Dan Ervin reports that nuclear waste disposal is a contentious subject. Nuclear proponents believe the engineering issues are, for the most part, solved, while a few critics believe major technical questions are unanswered, but these are generally unfounded. This divide is as great today as any time in the past.
In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The act was clear - the U.S. Government would take possession of used fuel at nuclear power plants beginning in 1998. Electric utilities have paid approximately $750 million annually to fund this project. The government did not take the spent fuel, however. Instead, it was penalized for breach of the law.
In 2002, Congress designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the site for a deep-geologic repository to hold spent fuel. But President Barack Obama, in a move aimed to please Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, killed the project in 2010, claiming it was unworkable  even though more than $10 billion spent on scientific studies and construction of an underground tunnel had determined the site was clearly suitable. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had also found that the DOE application to license the Yucca Mountain site met most of the requirements to dispose of spent fuel. The remaining requirements are still achievable now.
Congress has acted in a bi-partisan fashion. Once again, however, President Obama and Senator Reid have put partisan maneuvering ahead of the national well being. This spring, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved, by a wide margin, a bipartisan bill to let private companies establish interim facilities for storing spent fuel until reprocessing is revived in this country or a permanent repository becomes available.
These interim storage facilities would consolidate the fuel and hold it until a more permanent solution is approved. One virtue of reprocessing is that it would reduce the amount of nuclear waste requiring permanent disposal by more than one-half.
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