Twenty years late and $32 billion dollars over budget before it’s even open for business, is this the end for the nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada?

A few weeks after Sen. Harry Reid declared that the Yucca Mountain project was going to “bleed real hard” in the coming year, he said Monday the already reduced budget for the controversial nuclear waste plan will be cut “significantly” for the remainder of 2009, and that a 2010 White House spending request will contain “little if anything at all.”

We’ll wait and see but the end of the Yucca Mountain project has another upside beyond the closure of the folly itself. Delays in the construction and opening of Yucca Mountain have been seen as a large obstacle to the expansion of nuclear power in the US. With no viable plan for the safe disposal of nuclear waste in the country how can the go ahead for further nuclear reactors be given?

If President Obama is true to his word, surely nuclear is dead in America. His conditions can never be met.