Nuclear waste piles up with no disposal plan

Tens of thousands of tons of potentially lethal radioactive waste have been piling up across the nation for more than a generation, but the federal government has yet to decide how to get rid of it permanently. "It's going to continue to pile up," he said. "Ultimately, there has to be someplace (where) all that waste has to go. In my opinion, a permanent repository is the way to go."

The White House says even if the expert panel recommends a permanent "geologic" resting place for the waste, such a repository won't be built at Yucca Mountain, located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas in the home state of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

A 1982 law set a 1998 deadline for building a permanent disposal site, but it didn't happen.

It wasn't until 2002 that Congress, acting on President George W. Bush's recommendation, fixed up Yucca Mountain as the permanent site. Since then, taxpayers have spent more than $10 billion for exploratory work at the site, including building a deep tunnel.

Soon after becoming president, Obama announced he would cancel the Yucca Mountain project — a decision that South Carolina, Washington and some other local governments are fighting in federal court. Those state and local governments have teamed up with the nuclear industry to argue before the NRC that the administration can't terminate work on the project, only Congress can.

The nuclear energy industry is pushing for an interim storage facility where spent fuel rods could be stored while a geologic repository is built.

The government also should allow the industry to recycle the used fuel rods to extract all possible use from them, said McCullum at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Though legal in France, such "reprocessing" has been banned in the U.S. since 1977. President Jimmy Carter outlawed the practice that year, citing the potential for countries to use the plutonium byproduct to make atomic weapons.  Read more at GreenChange