Nevada wants feds to declare mothballed nuke dump plan dead

LAS VEGAS (AP) — After a decade in limbo, Nevada is pressing U.S. nuclear regulators to finally kill a mothballed proposal to entomb the nation’s most radioactive waste beneath a windswept volcanic ridge north of Las Vegas.

“The time has come to put this long-dormant and unproven federal project out of its misery,” the state said in a document submitted Tuesday to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about to the Yucca Mountain project. “Fundamental fairness requires that this proceeding be ended if possible."

The NRC, which regulates and licenses U.S. nuclear power plants and the handling of radioactive material, offered no immediate comment about the state request. Commission spokesman David McIntyre said the panel would review it.

The document urges the federal agency to reopen its review and finally end 40 years of Energy Department efforts to prove the Yucca Mountain site would be a safe place to put highly radioactive waste shipped in from power plants across the nation.

It derides the repository as “an unfunded zombie-like federal project that has staggered around the halls of Congress begging for appropriations support for more than a decade with no success.”

An estimated $15 billion was spent drilling a 5-mile U-shaped test tunnel and conducting studies of whether 77,000 tons (70,000 metric tons) of some of the most lethal material known to humans could remain safely buried for thousands of years at the site.

Some estimates put the final cost of building the repository at $100 billion, including drilling a honeycomb of underground rail tunnels and engineering a way to encase the waste and prevent leakage into underground water sources.

The U.S. has no long-term plan for managing or disposing of hazardous nuclear waste being produced and stored at reactors...