The nuclear waste site that must not be named

Has Yucca become a four-letter word?

At a U.S. Senate energy hearing this morning, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen was questioning experts about an upcoming generation of small nuclear reactors and how their waste products might be relocated .... well, somewhere.

"How do we deal with the waste? Taking it from a plant site and shipping it someplace -- I am not going to say Yucca Mountain because I don't want anybody to get upset about that," said Shaheen, D-N.H.

At the urging of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Obama administration has declared that emplacing high level waste at Yucca Mountain is no longer a preferred strategy for managing the radioactive materials. Reid, the project's most powerful critic, declares at every opportunity that it is history.

A license application for the Nevada site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, remains alive but barely. The Energy Department's budget for the project has been cut drastically under Obama and it appears from leaked documents that spending will be cut even more in the administration's upcoming budget for 2011.

Answering Shaheen's question, Tom Sanders, president of the American Nuclear Society said depending on the design, some modular reactors would need to be refueled only every 10 or 20 years, while others would require more frequent replenishment. As for transporting nuclear waste, Sanders said over the last 10 years, there have been 700 shipments of radioactive mixed waste to a disposal site in New Mexico without incident.