Holding Tank:
Nuclear waste lingers in dry-cask storage at the Idaho National Laboratory. More than 60,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are in temporary storage at 131 civilian and military sites around the country.
Peter Essick (Getty Images)
Key Concepts
- The Obama administration has effectively canceled the plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
- Spent fuel will for the foreseeable future continue to be stored on-site at 131 locations around the country.
- The end of Yucca means that all options for waste disposal are now in play, including recycling, use in advanced reactors and burial at other sites.
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Two weeks after President Barack Obama pulled the plug on Yucca Mountain, the site near Las Vegas where the federal government has been trying for 22 years to open a repository for nuclear waste, geochemist James L. Conca came to Washington, D.C., with an idea in his pocket.
Conca has been assigned by the state of New Mexico to monitor the environment around a different federal nuclear dump, one used for defense-related plutonium, and where others see problems, he sees opportunity.
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