Feds Approve New Nuclear Waste Disposal Site

May 10, 2023

US regulators have approved a private company’s plan to build a facility in New Mexico to store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants around the nation—over the objections of the state’s governor and congressional delegation. In Issues, Başak Saraç-Lesavre worries that such federal decisionmaking would leave local citizens without any voice “in defining what constitutes a desirable and morally defensible way to govern nuclear waste in the present and future.” Congress and the Biden administration, the author writes, “should formulate a political process that can put the decision back where it belongs: with the consent of the governed.”

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