Nevada Wants Nuclear Waste Site Cancelled
September 27, 2022
Nevada is pressing US nuclear regulators to officially kill long-troubled plans to establish a site at Yucca Mountain as a repository for radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear power plants. This would effectively put an exclamation point on the government’s failure to develop acceptable long-term storage options. In this gap, Başak Saraç-Lesavre writes in Issues, private companies are building their own facilities for storing spent nuclear fuel for up to 40 years. But this shift, the author argues, gives citizens no “voice in defining what constitutes a desirable and morally defensible way to govern nuclear waste in the present and future.”