Waste Management

Yucca Mountain / Can The US Finally End The $12 Billion Impasse?

By David Dalton
7 March 2018

Can The US Finally End The $12 Billion Impasse?
The Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, near Las Vegas.
7 Mar (NucNet): A US federal advisory panel recently took a step in what could be a lengthy process to determine if a deep geological nuclear waste repository should finally be built at Yucca Mountain, a project that has been on the drawing board since the 1970s at a cost of around $12bn (€9.7bn).

The panel held a meeting to receive input on reconstructing an electronic library for documents needed to decide on the US Department of Energy’s Yucca licence application. The meeting, at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s headquarters in Maryland, came one week after another development: the White House pledged $120m of funding in its 2019 federal budget proposal to restart licensing for the Yucca site, north of Las Vegas in Nevada, and to establish an interim storage programme to address the growing stockpile of nuclear waste produced by nuclear plants across the nation.

After decades of wrangling, could the US finally be on course to resolve the question of what to do with the high-level nuclear waste from the nation’s 99 commercial nuclear reactors?

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