Two years later and we're back to square one

For two years, the federally appointed commission charged with recommending a plan for dealing with the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle has been meeting and studying and talking. Last week, it released its 180-page report detailing what we already knew: Something has to be done about the tons of nuclear waste lingering in temporary storage across the country.

So, this commission spent two years traveling around the country talking to people about the issue and spending who knows how much taxpayer money, and this is the best it could do?

One of the recommendations in the report was to create a new organization that would oversee licensing, building and operation of facilities for the consolidated storage and disposal of spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste and would arrange for the transport of waste and spent fuel. Well, duh!

Shouldn't that group have been formed two years ago when the Obama Administration slammed the door on Yucca Mountain and suddenly the United States had no long-term storage site for this waste? And, that was after spending about $15 billion of taxpayer money to build, but never complete, what was supposed to be the answer to the storage for the tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel at nuclear sites around the country, including at the Savannah River Site.

To be fair, the commission didn't have the ability to do much more than it did. It couldn't take a stand on whether or not Yucca Mountain should be closed. And, it couldn't specifically recommend other sites.

So now, two years after shutting down Yucca Mountain, we're no closer to a solution for the tons of waste languishing at SRS than we were when this mess started.

One interesting recommendation in the report was encouraging communities to volunteer to be considered to host a new nuclear waste management facility. Nevada didn't want the Yucca Mountain repository and, eventually, the state had the political clout to stop it. If a suitable community wanted such a facility it could avoid problems like we have now.

So, now that we've wasted two years coming up with an alternative to Yucca Mountain, we hope the Department of Energy and Congress can step up the pace and find a solution.