Virginia Surry reports that some 25 feet below the surface of the clear, blue water, the tops of radioactive fuel assemblies glisten. Every 18 months a new load of spent fuel .... uranium pellets encased in zirconium is removed from the power station two reactors and put into the pool, which absorbs the excess heat and some of the most dangerous (and short-lived) radiation. There it sits for five years, before being moved outside into concrete containers which look like huge washing machines. But what then? Since the start of President Obama term in office in 2009, America has had no long-term plan for its nuclear waste.
As a candidate, Mr Obama promised to oppose the long-term plan to build a repository in Yucca Mountain, some 80 miles (129 km) north-west of Las Vegas, to win the support of Harry Reid of Nevada, the recent Democrat leader in the Senate. As a result, some 70,000 tons is waiting at power plants such as the one at Surry, in silos or in pools. Taken together that volume would occupy a surface storage area measuring 2 football fields long and some 15 feet deep. Mr. Reid, like Mr. Obama, is standing down in 2017. Their successors will face a question difficult to some, but easy for others. How to reopen the debate about what to do with spent fuel. The U.S. spent more than $2 billion to build the Yucca Mountain storage site. The site has overcome all reasonable environmental and geological issues. It is time to open the site to receive the nuclear storage waste from all over the country, as intended.
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