Lawmakers OK $577M for Yucca Nuclear Site

[Khephra]

WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers agreed Friday to provide enough money to keep alive plans for a nuclear waste dump in Nevada, but they put off trying to resolve a dispute over radiation protection that could doom the project if not resolved.

The compromise limits funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste program to $577 million this fiscal year, the same as last year but about two-thirds of the $880 million the Energy Department had said it needed to keep the program on track.

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-yucca-mountain,0,7722245.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

[genius]

1. If Reid wouldn't filibuster this, what will he filibuster?

That slime, he just sentenced 30 million Californians to death with his dance routine.

[seemslikeadream]

2. Poppy Strikes Gold

Poppy Strikes Gold
UTNE Reader
Tuesday, April 8, 2003

They could well afford it. In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush-era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could “perfect its patent” on the estimated $10 billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $ 10,000. Eureka!

Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada’s Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved—and the U.S. taxpayer lost—a cool billion or so.

...

How did he go from busted stereo maker to demi-billionaire goldbug? The answer: Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer, the “bag man” in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage scandals. The man who sent guns to the ayatolla teamed up with Munk on hotel ventures and, ultimately, put up the cash to buy Barrick in 1983, then a tiny company with an “unperfected” claim on the Nevada mine. You may recall that Bush pardoned the coconspirators who helped Khashoggi arm the Axis of Evil, making charges against the sheik all but impossible. (Bush pardoned the conspirators not as a favor to Khashoggi, but to himself.)

Khashoggi got out of Barrick just after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, long before 1995, when Bush was invited in. By that time, Munk’s reputation was restored, at least in his own mind, in part by massive donations to the University of Toronto. Following this act of philanthropy, the university awarded Munk-adviser Bush an honorary degree. Several students were arrested protesting what appeared to them as a cash-for-honors deal.

more

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=207&row=4

The "Barrick Museum of Natural History" houses the "Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies" on the campus of the University of Nevada.

http://www.unlv.edu/facilities/plancon/hrc.html