NRC deems Yucca Mountain safe for nuclear waste storage

New York Times : The long-contested Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, located in Nevada, may be allowed to move forward in light of the recent release of a long-delayed report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which says the site should be secure for at least a million years. First proposed in 1986 as one of five candidate sites, Yucca Mountain was designated the prime site by Congress a year later. However, over the past several decades, protests by environmentalists and Nevada residents, combined with numerous technical problems, have delayed its opening. Political wrangling has also played a part: While Republicans have worked hard to promote the site, the election in 2008 of President Obama, who vowed to kill the project, has proved a major setback. Meanwhile, the indecision is costing taxpayers money because the Department of Energy has been held liable by the courts for billions of dollars of damages for failure to fulfill its contract for storing the nuclear waste.