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The U.S. Energy Department has requested no funding in its fiscal 2011 budget request for the underground nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, the Christian Science Monitor reported Monday (see GSN, Jan. 29).
The agency is also no longer seeking a license for the planned facility, which has been vehemently opposed by environmentalists and Nevada lawmakers, the Las Vegas Sun reported.
"This is great news because it not only prevents Nevada from becoming the nation's nuclear dumping ground, it also protects hundreds of communities through which the waste would have had to travel in order to get to Yucca," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a released statement.
The Obama administration had already made it clear that it did not intend to move ahead with the Yucca Mountain project, which was intended to store tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste produced by reactors and other sources.
A new "blue ribbon" commission, led by former Indiana Representative Lee Hamilton and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, was established to consider alternate strategies for disposal of nuclear waste. That material for now will remain at the plants at which it was produced.
The new budget would allot additional funds that would boost nuclear power plant construction, the Monitor reported.
Fiscal 2011 begins Oct. 1 (Michael Farrell, Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 1).
Reid has requested that the federal Government Accountability Office look into possible other uses for the Yucca site. Among the options that congressional auditors, along with additional federal agencies and the state of Nevada, could consider are "national security activities, including armed services readiness, intelligence gathering, and defense technology testing and demonstration," and "arms control, verification, weapons detection, and other nonproliferation-related activities," the senator said in a letter to acting GAO Comptroller Gene Dodaro (U.S. Senator Harry Reid release, Feb. 2).