[Approx. Read Time: 3 minutes] The Yucca Mountain site in Nevada was to be the permanent long-term storage site for spent fuel and other nuclear waste. It was scheduled to be completed over 12 years ago. Decades of development and $20B later, project canceled.
Do not mis-conclude that nuclear power shouldn’t be used because there is no way to store the radioactive waste. Radioactive waste will stay radioactive for centuries and there is no way to make it un-radioactive. It can however be transported and stored safely inside shielded containers so that no radioactivity escapes to the air, soil or water. The proposed containers were designed with multiple layers of safety so that multiple different parts would have to fail at the same time for radioactive contents to be leaked. The DOE built a prototype container, left it on train tracks and hit with a locomotive. The thick titanium container remained leak-tight. 
The proposed Yucca Mtn facility had provisions for monitoring the integrity of the containers and for detecting and containing any container leaks within the facility. Even if despite the lottery-winning odds of all the layers of safety failing simultaneously, and radioactive material got into the soil at Yucca Mtn, the ground water is hundreds of feet below the surface and radiation can only travel about 10 feet through soil. That’s why the military now does all their nuclear weapons tests by detonating nukes buried deep in the ground. The detonation implodes the ground and they can calculate from the radius of the implosion what the effective blast radius in air would be. (The blast radius underground is way, way smaller than in air.) This underground testing of nukes that dwarf the WWII nukes in power is done in the remote deserts of Nevada. Can you believe that?! The same state whose not-in-my-backyard politicians have undermined all efforts to complete the Yucca Mtn project, claiming Yucca Mountain to be not 1,000,000% safe enough has over 1,000 implosions in their desert. Two decades and $20B have been spent making Yucca Mountain’s design risk as ridiculously microscopically miniscule as possible. How much time and energy was spent ensuring each of those potentially far more dangerous nuclear weapons tests would be safe? A tiny fraction I’m sure – but still enough. No one’s getting sick from the tests.
The reason for canceling Yucca Mountain is not technical infeasibility, but politicians and uninformed constituents who think it’s a lot more dangerous than is. Uninformed fear, that’s all it is. We can allow reprocessing of spent fuel – which we need to else we run out of uranium in 30 years - however 90% of the waste planned for Yucca was other contaminated material besides spent fuel. This waste is useless. France has been reprocessing spent fuel for decades without causing nuclear proliferation or anything. France’s energy is 85% nuclear generated. The US’s energy is 20% generated by nuclear power, 75+% by fossil fuels.
Which energy source are you for? Fossil plants can produce electricity 24/7, when the wind’s not blowing and the sun’s not shining, and fossil units can adjust power output on demand. Wind and solar can’t. A small fossil plant can produce as much energy as a zip-code’s worth of wind farms and solar power equipment. Accounting for the vast quantities of trees and wildlife habitat that has to be cleared to build a decent-sized wind or solar plant, wind and solar energy are not as green as they’re touted to be. All that land and equipment that has to be bought makes wind and solar energy a lot more expensive to generate than with a fossil plant. Most of what little wind and solar generation the US has wouldn’t exist if not for government mandates (cap and trade program). As for wind power creating jobs, 2 European counties reported the higher energy costs were destroying more 2.4 jobs for each 1 that wind farm building was creating. Solar would be the same because it is just as unconcentrated (whimpy) an energy source as wind.
But if we keep burning fossil fuels forever, we send the whole planet to eventual doom from global warming. Carbon emissions can’t be isolated from the environment but nuclear waste can be. We don’t have to cause global warming. We don’t have to bulldoze zip codes of land and pay $6,000/yr electric bills for power produced exclusively by renewables. Our lights, heat, air conditioning, TV and refrigerators can continue to have electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Nuclear power is affordable, carbon-free, 24/7 energy, we just need to get the government on board with reprocessing and Yucca Mountain. With reprocessing of spent fuel, there’s enough uranium to last centuries. We can either leave our current nuclear wastes at nuclear power stations across the country or send it to the remote Yucca Mountain with an over-engineered facility for isolating the waste indefinitely from the environment.
