Billions in tax dollars found buried in Nevada Cave

If you think anyone in Washington gives a damn about your money, listen to how they have wasted it, and will continue to waste it, because of "politics."

Taxpayers have spent more than $10 billion dollars digging a hole in a mountain in Nevada where the nation's nuclear waste was supposed to go. The Yucca Mountain project has been underway for nearly three decades. In 1987, Congress even passed a law explicitly directing waste from the nation's nuclear power plants would start arriving in Yucca Mountain in by the late 1990's.

So far, not one single radioactive isotope has made its way to Yucca, and probably never will.

President Obama, making good on a promise to Senate Majority Leader (and not-in-my-backyard-of-Nevada) Harry Reid, has effectively killed any future for the Yucca Mountain facility. More than $10 billion dollars of scientific study, engineering and congressional spending has just been thrown into a hole in the ground.

But Yuccas Mountain is not officially dead, and here is where the real arrogance of wasting your money comes in.

Even the President cannot kill the project because, remember, the project is law. According to the federal government, the government is required to build Yucca Mountain and accept the waste. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) would like to change that law, but without an option for where all this waste will go, it may be hard to get the votes.

So what to do?

Keep Yucca Mountain on life-support while you spend money looking for another alternative. President Obama plans to do just that by spending $197 million dollars in the 2010 budget, essentially to pay people to do nothing. Out at Yucca Mountain, there will be a staff getting paid, proceeding with licensing and other odds and ends, knowing all along that the project has no future.

It's pure politics that has already cost you and me $10 billion dollars and now $197 million more.

Let's hope they don't carve out more of Yucca Mountain to stuff with dollar bills.