The U.S. Energy Dept. is headed back to the drawing board for a national nuclear-waste depository. President Barack Obama, making good on a campaign pledge, is seeking an alternate dump site to Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. “I have consistently said that I am opposed to Yucca Mountain,” Obama told a Las Vegas crowd last January. “That will not change.”
The U.S. Energy Dept. has spent over $10 billion since 1983 performing geological tests and studies at Yucca Mountain in anticipation of storing 77,000 tons of radioactive waste there. Obama, however, last month revealed in his 2010 budget request to Congress that the administration will “devise a new strategy toward nuclear-waste disposal” and scale back operations at Yucca Mountain “to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”