Nuclear Waste Storage Puts Pressure on Yucca Mountain Talks

摘要

As lawmakers consider temporary sites for nuclear waste storage, two locations in New Mexico and Texas face headwinds that could pressure Congress to revive licensing hearings on the Department of Energy application to build a Nevada repository. But despite the need to act quickly, there is a lot to learn from the past when Congress was considering several storage sites but ultimately settled on only one, said Lake Barrett, who worked on Yucca Mountain for the Department of Energy Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management until his retirement in 2002. Barrett told Congress last week that attempts to store waste at interim sites failed in the 1980s in Tennessee, and other sites were dropped due to local opposition in the 1990s in Wyoming and New Mexico, and in Utah in the early 2000s.