A $915 MILLION LEGAL BILL … AND COUNTING
|| By FITSNEWS || We wrote recently about the bizarre back story offered as explanation for the severe facial injuries sustained by Senate minority leader Harry Reid on New Year’s Eve/ Day. Missed that story? Click here.
As entertaining as that drama may be, though, our primary focus is Reid’s costly, corrupt bargain with U.S. president Barack Obama. We’re referring, of course, to the Yucca Conspiracy – a shady, backroom deal which effectively shut down a nuclear waste repository and cost U.S. taxpayers (especially South Carolina taxpayers) billions of dollars in the process.
This controversy has been stoked by a series of opinion pieces in The Wall Street Journal … the first of which referred the deal as “a crude political bargain in which Reid agreed to do the President’s dirty work on Capitol Hill if Obama blocked the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.”
That article also accused Reid of invoking the “nuclear option” (no double entendre intended) in confirming judicial appointments in the U.S. Senate as political payback for a top appeals court defying him on Yucca Mountain.
“He was looking for revenge,” the Journal article stated.
This week a second Journal editorial has been published – one calling into question $915 million worth of legal fees paid out by the Department of Energy related to the stalled project.
According to an article published by the National Law Journal, these fees “went to nuclear power plants to settle breach-of-contract claims involving the storage of spent nuclear fuel.” And the fund itself? The NLJ described it as a “permanent, indefinite appropriation, exempt from annual congressional approval.”
So shady … and so costly.
This website continues to believe the Yucca Conspiracy is the very definition of “high crimes.” In fact we referred to them as “deliberate attempts to subvert the judicial and legislative processes.”
Obama and Reid need to be investigated – and held accountable for their actions. And South Carolina’s elected leaders – including its congressional delegation – need to be playing a far more vocal role in insisting upon such accountability.
8 comments
Rate payers paid into that “fund” that DOE settled with utilities from. You need to find out how much of that SCANA, Duke (Progress pre-merger) and (if any tp)Santee-Cooper. SCE&G flacks used to make a lot of noise about collecting that fee from their rate payers, and still having to store nuclear material at Jenkinsville, whole Dingy Harry kept Yucca from opening. They’ve been quite lately which makes me think they probably were rate-payer bailed out via DOE and LOG.
“…$915 million worth of legal fees paid out by the Department of Energy…”
Almost a freaking billion dollars in legal fees!?! We could have shot all of the waste to the Sun for a billion freaking dollars.
Some body (a group of somebodies probably) needs to either;
be pushed under a bus and backed up over three or four times,
or
be swiftly and justly tried before being dragged kicking and screaming out into the courthouse lawn and hung from the nearest tree
or
come to my house and explain in detail how they managed to pull this scam off so I can get in on the next one.
and hundreds of GS-10, 11, 12 and GM-11, 12 and -13 salaries in the land of the never ending midnight buffet. Maybe those jobs should be boosting the impoverished Allendale and Barnwell county economies over the last 30 years, cause Savannah River Site is where all the “vitrified” LSA (Low Specific Activity) material has been blocked up in the trail to being securely stored Yucca Mtn. Of course, recalling the low level waste issues (has any other state opened a depository like the agreement promised) environmental discrimination against poor black folk in SC since it is a red state.
Also at play is the German-DOE “conspiracy” whereby DOE and contractors aim to profit by dumping highly radioactive spent fuel at the Savannah River site here in South Carolina, with no exit path. DOE hopes to import 900,000 irradiated graphite spheres that were used as fuel in two long-closed gas-cooled reactors. DOE has told German entities that SRS would be a “disposition” site for the German spent fuel but that is totally untrue as such high-level nuclear waste under US law is required to go to a geologic (which doesn’t exist). And, a little problem that DOE faces is that it’s illegal under German law to export commercial spent fuel from Germany, especially for reprocessing (to remove uranium). Stay tuned for DOE’s release of a “draft environmental assessment” on the German scheme, to be followed by a 45-day comment period and public meeting (perhaps in N. Augusta, SC). And, be aware that legal action may be brewing in Germany against this DOE proposal and Obama’s DOE may be required to explain why it has pursued a deal of questionable legality. In any event, we’re tired of having nuclear waste dumped on us here in South Carolina and it’s clear that people here will not welcome the DOE dumping proposal. Tom Clements, Savannah River Site Watch, Columbia, SC
The whole deal sounds like yet another Central Planning Committee Hose-Up. This is typical, historically and lately, when “progressives” run up against a problem that their bigger Gruberment Mickey Mouse Mindset just can not “mitigate”.
It’s quasi-socialist, Woodrow Wilson inspired, FDR instituted, Mussolini-Stalin-Hitler motivated, Communist East German result, all over again.
Though DOE will claims the state has no decision-making role in the matter of the German high-level nuclear waste dumping, a big question on the matter is if Governor Nikki Haley will side with the the “quasi-socialist big-government Mickey Mouse mindset” or stand up for the people of South Carolina and demand that the feds not dump more nuke waste on us.
That is a very good question.
Don’t worry. DHEC will check it all out and make sure it is all OK.