Research and development activities to support Yucca are permitted. This will ensure that we keep Congress in the driver's seat for nuclear waste policy.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We as taxpayers have put in well over $12 to $15 billion of investment in a repository for high-level nuclear waste... if we're ever to recoup that investment in the future... then we're going to need some money to reopen Yucca Mountain.
For nuclear power to have a future, we'll either need more Yucca Mountains or a way to decrease the stuff we put there.
Nuclear power is here to stay, and we need to support a strong domestic uranium industry.
It's a national concern, I mean how we dispose of nuclear waste in a safe way, how we deal with this incredible amount of nuclear waste we have created over the years.
The House has repeatedly had overwhelming votes in support of continuing the Yucca Mountain repository.
If Yucca Mountain had not been designated as a dumpsite for radioactive waste in 1987, it might easily have become a scenic overlook on the long drive between Tonopah and Las Vegas.
Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It's the reactor of your dreams.
I think we ultimately ought to look to put all uranium enrichment and fuel reprocessing, if any is done, under multinational control. Those are the two technologies by which nuclear energy can be translated into nuclear weapons programmes.
The international community must do a better job of controlling the risks of nuclear proliferation. Sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle - the production of new fuel, the processing of weapon-usable material, the disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste - would be less vulnerable to proliferation if brought under multinational control.
In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.