So Much Radioactive Waste, So Little Time

It's been a big news week for nuclear waste, with most of the attention going to the Department of Energy's announcement that it has at long last submitted an application to open a nuclear waste repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. After two decades of planning, the application nudges the project a little closer to reality, but there's a long way to go yet. Nevada officials remain violently opposed to the "nuclear dump," and lawsuits are inevitable. The Department of Energy says that the repository won't be ready to open until 2020, at the earliest. Meanwhile, in a laboratory in Tennessee, the Energy Department is trying to clean up an aging nuclear waste cache left over from the Cold War, only to have its own inspector general declared the waste a "national resource" because of its potential use in cancer treatments. Best to start with the mountain, and the mountain of paperwork. Yesterday, the government delivered the 8,600-page application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, trying to prove its contention that the storage facility could safely hold the 70,000 metric tons of waste into the indefinite future.