"Currently 126 temporary facilities scattered across 39 states are keeping 71,862 tons of nuclear waste in cooling ponds and in storage buildings near nuclear reactors.
Storing high-level nuclear waste above ground for a century allows observers to detect and manage problems as radioactive decay reduces the level of radioactivity and associated harmful effects to the container material.
The U.S. nuclear industry says the power-plant sites are storing waste safely, although it has long pushed for a long-term storage facility.
Meanwhile, the pile of waste is growing by 2,200 tons a year, even as some of the sites already have in storage four times the amount of spent fuel that they were designed to handle.
In 1987 Congress selected Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the only site to be investigated as the potential geologic repository for U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste. It condemned the United States to pursue a policy that had no backup if Yucca Mountain failed politically or technically.
And politically fail it did. Recent action to shelve Yucca Mountain leaves no specific site in the plans and reconvenes the need for exploring alternatives.
Even if a facility had been built there, the U.S. already has more waste than it could have handled".......read it here
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