Yucca Mountain: The Waste Nobody Wants
Near Beatty, Nevada
About eighty miles northwest of Las Vegas, on the edge of the Nevada Test Site, there is a mountain with eight miles of tunnels bored through its volcanic rock. The tunnels are empty. They have been empty for years. They were built to hold the most dangerous material the United States has ever produced.
In nineteen eighty-seven, Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the permanent repository for the country's high-level nuclear waste, the spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear power plants and the contaminated materials from decades of weapons production. The decision came over the sustained objection of Nevada's congressional delegation and the state's residents. Nevada had not asked for the nation's nuclear waste. It had not been consulted in a way that mattered. The mountain was chosen partly because it was remote, partly because its geology seemed stable, and partly because Nevada had fewer congressional votes than the states that wanted the waste to go somewhere else.
The Department of Energy spent fifteen billion dollars on site characterization, licensing studies, and tunnel construction over two decades. In two thousand ten, the Obama administration withdrew the license application, responding to political pressure from Nevada's senior senator, Harry Reid, who was then the Senate Majority Leader and who had spent his career making this particular fight his own.
As of twenty twenty-six, Yucca Mountain remains the only federally designated permanent repository site authorized by law. The license application is withdrawn but the site authorization has never been formally rescinded. The tunnels sit in the mountain, empty and permitted. The waste they were meant to receive sits in temporary storage at seventy-six nuclear plant sites across the country, in pools and dry casks that were never designed for permanent use.
The problem Yucca Mountain was meant to solve remains unsolved. What to do with the waste is the question the American nuclear program has not answered since the first test at Trinity in nineteen forty-five.
