The United States spent — or wasted, as it turns out — $14 billion to develop a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in an isolated part of the Nevada desert. The goal was to store at Yucca Mountain the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants around the nation.
It was not a perfect plan, considering that the waste would have to be hauled cross country to the site. But the United States has a sterling record of nuclear power safety, and the Yucca Mountain proposal was vetted thoroughly over a period of two decades.
Then President Barack Obama pulled the plug. He said he was “done with Yucca” — very possibly because it would harm the re-election chances of embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The administration appointed a commission to study alternatives, but that process alone will take years — even as nuclear waste continues to pile up in diverse locations around the country.
There was no good policy reason to shut down the Yucca Mountain plan, and now Tennessee and other states that have extensive nuclear energy production must cast about for other solutions, including the possibility of “recycling” waste to extract more energy. That may be a worthwhile pursuit, but it will not solve the entire nuclear waste problem.
The administration was unwise to kill the Yucca Mountain plan. Like nuclear energy itself, Yucca Mountain was not ideal. But if we wait for “ideal” solutions to meet our energy needs and deal with undesirable side effects, we will have to stop producing energy altogether.