Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository

The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is to be a deep geological repository storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other high level radioactive waste in the United States. The site is located on federal land adjacent to the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about 80 mi (130 km) northwest of the Las Vegas Valley.

The project was approved in 2002 by the United States Congress, but Federal funding for the site ended in 2011 under the Obama Administration via amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011. The project has had many difficulties and was highly contested by the general public, the Western Shoshone peoples, and many politicians. The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.

This leaves the US government and utilities without any designated long-term storage site for the high-level radioactive waste stored on-site at various nuclear facilities around the country. The US government disposes of transuranic waste at WIPP in New Mexico, in rooms 2,150 feet (660 m) underground.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is reviewing other options for a high-level waste repository and the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, established by the Secretary of Energy, released its final report in January 2012. It expressed urgency to find a consolidated, geological repository, and said that any future facility should be developed by a new independent organization with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund, which is not subject to political and financial control as is the cabinet department of the Department of Energy. In the meantime, most nuclear power plants in the United States have resorted to the indefinite on-site dry cask storage of waste in nearly impervious steel and concrete casks.

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