by Alyssa Carducci
Heartland Magazine

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined it would be safe to operate a nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The NRC completed the last two volumes of its five-volume safety evaluation in January…

Tom Tanton, president of T 2 & Associates, a consulting firm to the energy and technology industries, said approval of Yucca Mountain is perhaps the only regulatory proceeding that has taken longer than the Keystone pipeline. He participated in early proceedings in the 1980s.

“Every time a new requirement has been raised, science and innovation show approval should be forthcoming. But that raises another, broader point. The requirements should be fixed and firm at the start of any regulatory process. Too often opponents of anything can simply delay and delay by raising new ‘concerns’ near the end of the process, damning projects to an endless loop of politicized Luddism,” he said.