Industry observers are hopeful that recent initiatives by the Obama administration and Congress could help to break the long-running impasse over the storage and disposal of high-level radioactive waste.
On March 24, President Obama signed a directive to enable federal officials to identify a site to store high-level defense-related waste, and a group of senior senators introduced a bill to establish a policy for addressing the long-term storage of nuclear and defense-related radioactive waste. And, on March 27, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), one of the most vocal opponents of the Yucca Mountain geological storage site in the Senate, announced his plan to retire in two years.