Last year, the Energy Department set up a commission to figure out what to do with the country’s nuclear waste after a planned repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was nixed. This week, the commission came back and advised a “consent-based approach” to choosing a new site. How would this work?
To understand America’s nuclear waste woes, it’s worth looking back at how the controversial Yucca Mountain waste repository, which was finally squelched by President Obama in 2009, went so badly awry in the first place. The problem, as it turned out, wasn’t so much technical — most scientists agree that it’s feasible to design a long-term storage facility — as political.
