More letting politics trump science

Jay Ambrose highlights another incident where Obama has allowed politics triumph over science - and that is his ending funding for using Yucca Mountain in Nevada for storing nuclear waste. For this issue he yielded to anti-nuclear fearmongerers as well as Harry Reid's political needs.

For more than two decades, some observers note, engineers and scientists of various stripes have tested and then retested the area, and then tested it once again, consuming something like $8 billion in the process and finding it about as safe as any place in America could conceivably be.

And that’s before you add in two other pacifying factors.

The first of these is that the government could store the 57,700 tons of material now existing and the additional waste being produced in a manner that would make it easy to remove during the next 300 years if there should be any hint whatsoever of anything going badly wrong.

The next factor, it has been maintained, is that the storage there could be an important first step for the recycling of much of the waste in plants availing themselves of new, developing technology that could vastly minimize the creation of any waste that could not be recycled again.

For a many who proudly proclaims his intention to let science trump politics, he sure seems to let politics trump science when it is convenient to him.