The U.S. Department of Energy is lobbying to expand the controversial plan to store nuclear waste inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, even as the entire project's fate is thrown into uncertainty with the election of Barack Obama as the nation's next president. The locally unpopular project has been repeatedly delayed due to lawsuits and safety concerns (the federal government originally promised to start accepting waste from nuclear power companies in 1998, but is now scheduled to open in 2020), and Obama has previously signaled that he might scrap the facility all together. Yet recent statements by the Energy Department's Edward Sproat underscored the urgency of finding some safe, final destination for the United States' growing piles of nuclear waste. Sproat told Congress last week that
the 77,000-ton limit Congress put on the capacity of the proposed Yucca waste dump will fall far short of what will be needed and has to ...
