Statement by Jill Lancelot, Legislative Director at Taxpayers for Common Sense for the May 7th Yucca Mountain Press Conference:

Washington, D.C. – I am Jill Lancelot, Co Founder and Legislative Director for Taxpayers for Common Sense. Our mission is to protect American taxpayers, and our goal is to cut wasteful government spending and subsidies.

The Yucca Mountain project is a bad budget-busting approach to a very real problem. Continued support of this project stands in the way of finding a far more cost effective solution to the nation's burgeoning nuclear waste problem.

This project does not and will not solve the nuclear waste problem. When Yucca is filled to capacity with 77,000 metric tons of waste there will still be another 44,000 metric tons of waste at nuclear facilities around the country in need of storage.

Yucca is a bad deal for taxpayers and ratepayers. The projected cost of the project has skyrocketed to a whopping $56 billion, becoming one of the most expensive projects in the nation’s history. Yet, major scientific questions remain unanswered. In all likelihood, costs will continue to soar if the project continues. This raises a fundamental question: Why are we, the taxpayers, subsidizing any of the costs of doing business for this industry, giving them an unfair advantage against other competing energy industries?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says there are still hundreds of scientific questions that need more scrutiny prior to moving forward with the Yucca project. Remaining questions include the effect of seismic activity on the repository, or the stability of the repository under a variety of conditions.

For this reason and others, the General Accounting Office has stated that the recommendation of moving forward with Yucca may be premature. If we proceed with this project we are perversely throwing good money after bad.

Clearly, this is not the answer to the critical need of addressing the storage of the nation’s nuclear waste. Just say no to Yucca and stop spending our hard-earned tax and ratepayer dollars on a project that is ill conceived and misguided. Say no to Yucca and remove once and for all, the roadblock to finding a real and common sense solution to the nuclear waste problem.