John McCain and Yucca Mountain
In Reno this week, Republican presidential nominee-to-be John McCain took up the issue of Yucca Mountain, expressing his support for the creation of a nuclear waste repository there but also for reprocessing nuclear waste. McCain also said he'd push for the creation of an international facility for the purpose of storing nuclear waste from around the world. Read the Las Vegas Review-Journal's coverage here.
NPRI weighed in on this subject back in 2001, in a still-relevant study written by D. Dowd Muska titled Spare the Rods: The Free-Market Alternative to the Yucca Mountain Repository.
"[T]he philosophy behind the Yucca Mountain program fails to grasp that used fuel from commercial reactors is not 'waste,' but a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace," wrote Muska, who argued that the way to address the used-nuclear-fuel problem was to "harness the creativity and entrepreneurship of the private sector."
Given that Yucca Mountain is once again in the headlines this week, now is a good time to revisit Muska's work on the subject, available here.
