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U.S. Waste Disposal Plans and the Yucca Mountain Repository

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Abstract

Planning for the disposal of nuclear wastes in the United States has undergone many changes—in both administrative leadership and overall strategy—in the almost six decades since the wastes began to be generated. The power to make decisions has moved from the tight control of a single federal body into an arena in which many governmental and even nongovernmental groups have significant, and sometimes conflicting, roles. On the technical side, the basic assumption that all of the wastes would be reprocessed has been abandoned, and the originally favored geologic formation for disposal, bedded salt, has been bypassed. It has been difficult to find disposal sites because public trust in the federal government and its scientists is insufficient to overcome local fears. Some of this history is sketched in this section, along with a summary of the current institutional status of nuclear waste disposal.

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag New York, LLC

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(2004). U.S. Waste Disposal Plans and the Yucca Mountain Repository. In: Nuclear Energy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-26931-2_12

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