Ahlers, Mike M. “Hot Nuclear Waste, Cold Hard Cash, and You.” CNN. Cable News Network, 16 May 2014. Web. 01 Mar. 2015. <http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/16/us/nuclear-waste-money/index.html>.

In this CNN article we learn that for over 30 years, the US government had been collecting a fee from the power companies in order to be able to dispose of the nuclear waste that we have lying all over the country. After a battle between the department of energy and many power companies and state regulators they managed to win and end the collection of the fee. The fee was being charged a tenth of a cent for every kilowatt hour of power produced by nuclear power this all adds up to about 15 to 20 cents on the monthly electric bill. these numbers might seem miniscule but all of these fees amounted to about $750 million in fees per year. These fees were all placed into a fund which has about $31 billion dollars and is growing yearly through interest by $1.3 billion. Many of these companies have found that a lot of the nuclear debris still hasn’t been disposed of and there is now an estimated amount of about 2,000 tons of waste added yearly to the rowing number of 70,000 million tons of nuclear waste.

When we see how much money has been collected and how much the government has actually done with that money its disappointing and it shows our governments lack of interest in the safety of its people and its land. Also I feel that the government should have let the plants know about the fee instead of taking a percentage of the income and using it to invest into failed nuclear waste plants such as the nuclear repository plant in nevada on the Yucca Mountain. One other big issue is that a lot of this waste has to be left alone for a number of years before it can be disposed of, if we dont wait then there could be many consequences.