Thread: Obama wants to cancel Yucca Mountain funding

Originally Posted by Anonymous D

So what do they plan to do with all the nuclear "waste"?

As I said, it will continue to be stored in the same places it is currently being stored, which is on-site at the power plants producing it. Right now, every nuclear power plant in the US has a building where the spent fuel rods from the reactors are stored in big sealed casks. So the "waste" is distributed throughout the country at numerous different locations. The idea behind Yucca Mountain was to consolidate it all in a single ultra-secure facility; now that Yucca Mountain has been canceled, the "waste" will stay where it is, stored at nuclear power plants around the country, until the government figures out what they really want to do with it (which will hopefully be reprocessing it so that it can be used again, like every other country that operates nuclear power plants, because right now we are treating fuel as "waste" when it still has like 95% of it's usable energy).