600 Yucca Mountain Project Workers May Be Out Of Jobs – 02/04/10

Submitted by Doug Cunningham on February 3, 2010 - 4:10pm
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The future of the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project looks bleak. Jesse Russell reports.

Fulfilling a campaign promise President Barack Obama zeroed out funding for the 23-year-old project leaving more than 600 workers wondering if they will have jobs come September. The goal of the project was to keep nuclear waste safe for millions of years, but opponents raised concerns of both radiation coming out of the site and the transportation of waste to the site. Studies had come down supporting both pro and con arguments regarding the facilities with accusations of falsification of those studies being common. The facility is expected to be fully shut down in September if it isn’t licensed in the next 30 days. After that it would take an act of Congress to restart work at Yucca. At the peak 2,750 workers were employed at Yucca, but that number has dropped since 2005 to today’s total of 625 workers. Also unknown is what will now happen to Cold War-era military waste scheduled to be stored in Yucca.