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As nuclear waste piles up, Obama must step up
April 10, 2011

THE OBAMA administration’s decision last year to cancel the long-planned federal nuclear waste depository in Nevada has never seemed more irresponsible. The dangers of unsafely stored nuclear waste have been vividly illustrated in Japan, where spent nuclear fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant caught fire, releasing radioactive material. The administration should reverse itself before pursuing any expansion of nuclear power.

Right now, most spent nuclear fuel in the United States is stored in wet-storage pools at reactors, in much the same manner as the fuel storage system at Fukushima. Nationally, 71,862 tons of waste have accumulated, packed into pools that were never intended to hold so much. Massachusetts is home to 701 tons of spent nuclear fuel, with much more stored across New England.


The Yucca Mountain depository, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was designed to hold radioactive waste for 10,000 years. The facility would not be a complete solution — the nation’s waste stockpiles have already grown too big for Yucca to hold — but it is a viable plan that the federal government spent more than $10 billion developing. The administration’s decision to cancel the depository was a profile in craven political calculation: candidate Obama promised to cancel Yucca Mountain to curry favor in the 2008 Nevada caucuses, and he followed through on the urging of a key political ally, Democratic Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.

While canceling Yucca, Obama also named a blue-ribbon panel to come up with new strategies for dealing with waste. The panel is expected to consider ways to reuse spent fuel, and may also recommend more dry-casking of waste, a process that moves spent rods from wet pools into safer concrete-and-steel boxes. That would be an improvement, but it is not a substitute for long-term, permanent storage.

The administration’s cancellation of Yucca was especially troubling because Obama has also been a stalwart backer of expanding nuclear energy. The attitude of supporters of nuclear power seems to be to push ahead with new reactors, even while passing responsibility for the waste on to future generations.

Especially in the wake of the Japanese crisis, that’s clearly an irresponsible strategy. Since 1982, the federal government has promised to build a permanent storage facility for spent fuel. It’s time to quit stalling. If the administration wants to build more nuclear power, it first has to produce a long-term strategy for handling the waste.