After a week of meetings with regulatory boards, listening to the NRC statements which were confusing at best and possibly disingenuous, I think I understand what is going on.

Nuclear Power is the Department of Energy’s Michael Vick and depleted uranium is Nuclear Power’s dog fighting ring. But in this analogy the DOE(Atlanta falcons) and the NRC (The police) both want Vick back in the game ASAP.

You remember the story: The Atlanta Falcons needed someone to move the football for them, and Michael Vick moved the football like nobody else. Well the DOE is looking for a way to boil water (Yep, boil water! That’s how we get our electricity – super high tech), and nuclear power plants boil water in a major way!

The Falcons had a problem though – Michael Vick was into dog fighting. The police found out and so the Falcons had to let Vick go and Vick had to go to jail.

That's how it should be – if your solution to all your problems (Vick and touch downs being the Falcons solution and problems respectively) can’t respect the health and safety of animals and or people then it has to go. Good thing we have independent enforcement in the NFL.

Turns out that Nuclear Power has a problem too – waste.
Radioactive waste

Here’s the immediate problem: when you make nuclear fuel, you also make a lot of depleted uranium. Depleted uranium is nasty stuff. I listened as experts from BYU and Notre Dame (crazy liberal universities, I know) testified to the NRC and DOE that depleted uranium needs to be disposed of in a deep geologic repository. I listened while no one listened to them.
Deep geologic disposal is sort of like sending it to jail – but unlike Michael Vick depleted uranium can’t really turn its life around so it has to stay in jail FOREVER.

The problem is that the NRC and DOE don’t have a very good track record with geologic repositories (Yucca Mountain etc…).

Sitting in the Department of Environmental Quality conference room and University Marriott last week I had the strange feeling that the NRC and DOE had come to make us feel safe while they come up with a way to dump depleted uranium in the desert and then cover it with dirt. This happens to be most of what EnergySolutions does (they word it differently though… something about embankments and liners and caps).

One observer used the term "kangaroo court" to describe the NRC process.

Though Larry Camper (Director of the Division of

 Waste Management at the NRC) looks more like Tom Selleck than a kangaroo, I find the description dismally accurate.

Disposing of depleted uranium in above-ground 'embankments' is like using a Band-Aid when you need a skin graft, but the NRC and DOE are all about the Band-Aids and dog-fighting rings and boiling water.