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Nuclear Waste Needs More Space

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The Associated Press

Published: November 7, 2008

WASHINGTON - The Energy Department will tell Congress in the coming weeks it should begin looking for a second permanent site to bury nuclear waste, or approve a large expansion of the proposed waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Edward Sproat, head of the department's civilian nuclear waste program, said Thursday the 77,000-ton limit Congress put on the capacity of the proposed Yucca waste dump will fall far short of what will be needed and has to be expanded, or another dump built elsewhere.

The future of the Yucca Mountain project is anything but certain.

President-elect Barack Obama has said he doesn't believe the desert site is suitable for keeping highly radioactive used reactor fuel up to a million years and believes other options should be explored.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has vowed to block the project.

Sproat, addressing a conference on nuclear waste, said the Energy Department will send a report to Congress in the coming weeks maintaining that the Yucca site will need to be expanded. He said within two years the amount of waste produced by the country's 104 nuclear power plants plus defense waste will exceed 77,000 tons. Yucca Mountain is not projected to be opened before 2020 at the earliest.

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