The federal government applied for a license Tuesday to build a long-planned dump for the nation's radioactive waste in Nevada, but state officials vowed a renewed effort to block it, saying Washington has "lost track of reality."
After a quarter-century of scientific dispute and legal wrangling, the Energy Department officially launched what could be one of the most complex and costly engineering efforts in history. The Yucca Mountain repository, located 16 miles from the California border, would eventually store 70,000 metric tons of waste that has been accumulating since the first reactors went online.
And the amount of waste will grow at an increasing rate in future decades: In the last year, utilities have launched a nuclear power renaissance, announcing plans for 15 new commercial reactors.
The application "will further encourage the expansion of nuclear power in the United States, which is absolutely critical to our energy security, to our environment and to our national security," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Tuesday.
The license application, which is 8,600 pages long, was filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has up to four years to act. If everything goes unfettered, Bodman said, Yucca Mountain could be open for business by 2020 at a cost of about $70 billion.
Although the impetus for a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain may be greater than ever, the legal and political hurdles for the project are vast.
A sharp cut in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's budget has left it short of resources, Chairman Dale E. Klein said. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is years behind schedule in issuing a health standard for radioactive leakage from the dump. A previous standard was ruled illegal by a federal appeals court.
The issues that remain undecided could set off a frenetic pace of legal and regulatory scrambling in the closing days of the Bush administration.
Nevada officials said the administration was rushing forward with an incomplete application out of the belief that it would be more difficult to stop once it was in motion.
"They are just trying to get this on the plate while they still have a pal in the White House," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in an interview. "All they want to do is get it out of their hands and give it to the next administration."
