As the U.S. Congress currently debates (or rather, does't debate) the infamous "Fiscal Cliff," it took the country off a bottomless cliff 30 years ago today, by passing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The NWPA shifted liability for highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel, from the utilities which generated it (and profited mightily thereby), to the American people: first, ratepayers have paid tens of billions of dollars in nuclear generated electricity surcharges, into the Nuclear Waste Fund; then, when that still falls short of the price tag, taxpayers will be left holding the bag for the rest.
As written by John D'Agata in his 2010 book About a Mountain:
"...On November 22, 1982, Senator James McClure [Republican from Idaho], the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced a bill that was written by the American Nuclear Energy Council [now called the Nuclear Energy Institute] calling for the disposal of nuclear waste...He pushed his bill through committee in an hour and a half, then sent it to the floor for an expedited vote.
It arrived there on the evening of December 21, just hours before the Senate recessed for Christmas break.
Within thirteen minutes, and without a single minute of debate, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was voted into law.
'I would like the meet the Senator,' said one observer that night, 'who call tell us what he thinks is even in this bill.'" (page 35)
President Ronald Reagan then signed the NWPA into law early the next year. That "expedicted vote," Reagan's stroke of the pen in the Oval Office, and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) rushed signing of contracts to "take out the garbage," represented an unprecedented subsidy for the nuclear power industry. The American taxpayer currently forks over $500 million per year in damages to nuclear utilities for failing to begin disposing of irradiated nuclear fuel in a deep geologic repository in 1998. That liability grew worse, when George W. Bush's DOE signed yet more contracts -- for proposed new reactors -- in the waning weeks, days, and even hours of the administration (between the day Barack Obama was elected president, and two days after he was sworn into office, DOE hastily signed 21 proposed new reactors' worth of new waste disposal contracts).
Actually, there was some fairness and balance to the NWPA. It established a science-based approach in the search for a suitable site for deep geologic disposal. It also contained some sense of regional equity, in that the first repository, likely out West, could only be loaded with 63,000 metric tons of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel (and another 7,000 tons of DOE jurisdiction wastes, mostly from the nuclear weapons complex), at least until a second repository was opened, this time in the East (75% of the commercial reactors in the U.S. are east of the Mississippi -- an imaginary line drawn down the middle of the country would reveal that 90% of reactors are in the eastern half).
However, the original approach was quickly abandoned. In 1987, over the objections of the Silver State and its rookie Senator, Harry Reid, the "Screw Nevada Bill" was passed. It did away with the science-based comparison of multiple potential repository sites, singling out Yucca Mountain as the only site in the country for further consideration. This, despite the fact that by the early 1980s, as documented by Dr. Arjun Makhijani of IEER, DOE had already documented that Yucca had fatal geological flaws. All told, $11 billion of ratepayer and taxpayer money was wasted at Yucca, although the project price tag, if the project had proceeded, would have approached $100 billion.
Reid devoted his political career to stopping the dump. The population of Las Vegas, less than 100 miles from Yucca, grew by unimaginable leaps and bounds. Altogether, over time, a thousand environmental groups joined the chorus opposing the dump, and the Western Shoshone National Council pressed its treaty rights to defend its sacred land against such radioactive abuse. To his credit, in 2009-2010, President Obama wisely cancelled the Yucca Mountain Project, fulfilling a campaign pledge to Nevadans.
Obama's "Plan B" (recommendations published in January 2012 by the so-called Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, a panel of 15 members, which his Energy Secretary Steven Chu had appointed) calls for prioritizing and expediting "consolidated interim storage" -- shipping commercial wastes by truck, train, and barge to such targeted "centralized, temporary" locations as the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons complex in South Carolina, Exelon's Dresden nuclear power plant just west of Chicago, etc.
Rather than rushing into this unnecessarily risky radioactive waste shell game on the roads, rails, and waterways of most states, a coalition of 200 environmental groups has called for hardened on-site storage for the wastes which already exist. And a growing movement is calling for a cessation of generation: "STOP MAKING IT!" As Beyond Nuclear board member, Dr. Judith Johnsrud, has put it, radioactive waste is "trans-solutional." Humankind may very well be unable to solve the problem. The only real solution for radioactive waste is to not make it in the first place.