Energy Department Seeks License for Yucca Mountain

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. Energy Department submitted an application seeking to build and operate the nation’s first permanent repository for used nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

The 17-volume application was filed today with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, David McIntyre, a commission spokesman, said in an interview. The energy department has said the underground facility could begin accepting waste as early as 2017 from shutdown reactor sites and the nation’s 104 operating reactors.


“Basically, we are rolling up our sleeves and going to work,” McIntyre said.

The project, estimated in 2001 to cost $58 billion, has been delayed by funding problems, legal challenges and allegations of falsified quality checks. The department initially agreed to take waste from commercial nuclear power plant owners by 1998, and the owners have sued the agency for failing to meet that deadline.

It is a “major milestone for the nation,” Steve Kraft, senior director of used fuel management for the Nuclear Energy Institute, told reporters on May 29. “Frankly, it’s past time.”

Bloomberg