commentaries

I propose that, since the Energy Department and its predecessors have been dragging anchor on this since they started collecting waste fees on nuclear fuel in the 60s, a bucket of old fuel rods goes under each bureaucrat's desk at the DOE offices until they open their nuclear waste dump. it may motivate their process some.

One of the problems today is people sitting on money - not investing it, just letting it sit in MM accounts earning nothing to practically nothing. How do we get the money moving again? What do we do with this metallic waste? Yes folks you got it, mint the stuff – or at least make it one of the ingredients. Stop using copper and nickel and replace those precious metals with what we now consider trash. We solve the problem of what to do with the stuff and incent people to spend.

News flash. NO waster has ever been shipped off prairie island site. It is ALL stir there. Sitting in steel casks. In an area less than 1 acre is size. Actually much less. It takes up almost no room. It's not even covered with a menards pole barn. It is flat out safe and secure. There is NO storage crisis. Just leave it right where it is. Why is it safer in a mountain in Nevada? So a meteor won't hit it?

They should store it in Washington DC to give our politicians some motivation to do something about it and make a decision.

Not only is the DOE to blame, but NV Sen Harry Reid has been stonewalling Yucca Mtn for years.

This is failure on a grand scale by the Department of Energy. The federal government should be repaying the money they took from ratepayers, because the federal government has not delivered on their promise of a high-level waste repository. While this has been ongongi through several administrations, I specifically thank the Obama administration for nailing the coffin shut on Yucca Mountain. It's rotten leadership to eliminate the most viable option without having an alternative, unless he was betting large on Solyndra. Oh wait, he was. With your money.

Everyone else in the world reprocess their nuclear fuel. The amount of contamination is actually very small. Thanks, President Carter.

yep, its always best to let the government control things

Yucca Mountain is located on the largest military base in the United States. A short distance away lay the cratered radioactive remains of 900 nuclear weapons tests. If this country cannot muster the will to store nuclear waste in a highly protected radioactive wasteland, where can we store it?

arspartz, Gerald Ford indefinitely suspended the recycling of plutonium in October 1976. After taking office a few months later, Jimmy Carter expanded the moratorium to all spent nuclear fuel. The moratorium was put in place after India had demonstrated the ability to create nuclear weapons by refining spent nuclear fuel.

While countries with large recycling programs continued recycling nuclear waste, nations without advanced infrastructure stopped doing so after the moratorium was put in place. The Ford and Carter moratoriums slowed the proliferation of nuclear weapons making the United States and the rest of the world a safer place.

Ronald Reagan lifted the moratorium in 1981. While the US could resume reprocessing spent nuclear fuel it would likely lead to other nations doing the same thing. In turn, more nations would develop nuclear weapons.