Unfortunately, even if Congress acts in early 2007, the best-case scenario for a centralized nuclear waste repository brings us to 2017. And that would require quite a few politicians and bureaucrats coming to their senses. While they haggle over whether the nuclear waste can be safely stored for 10,000 years (which a number of scientific studies confirm that it can), or whether the waste site must store the spent nuclear fuel for one million years, electricity consumers are annually paying $1 billion for temporary storage.

The amount of nuclear waste accumulating since U.S. utilities began powering our homes with nuclear energy comes to about 54,000 metric tons over the past forty years. To put this in perspective, it would take up the size of a football field with a depth of less than 10 yards. Nuclear energy does not generate carbon dioxide emissions. By contrast, the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere through fossil fuels is enormous. According to one of the world’s leading environmental scientists, James Lovelock, who recently authored “The Revenge of Gaia” (Basic Books, 2006), one could freeze the annual carbon dioxide emissions and create a mountain one mile high and twelve miles in circumference. And that’s each year. Using the same yardstick since the 1960s, we would have 40 such mountains of carbon dioxide, but one small football field of nuclear waste.

A Mountain Which Can Solve the Current Waste Disposal Issue

After passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) chose nine locations in six states as potential permanent repository sites. The DOE whittled this list down to five sites after various technical studies and environmental assessments. After intensive scientific study, the DOE chose its finalists: Yucca Mountain, Nevada, Deaf Smith County, Texas and Hanford, Washington. Following lengthy environmental studies of all three sites, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1987 and designated Yucca Mountain to be studied as the final destination for nuclear waste.

“We’ve been studying Yucca Mountain for 22 years,” Steven Kraft told us during a recent telephone interview. Mr. Kraft is mechanical engineer who serves as the senior director for Used Fuel Management at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and was part of the Recovery Team following the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979. “It is the most studied piece of real estate on the face of the earth. There isn’t anything we don’t know about it.”