By the end of this decade, an estimated 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel will have accumulated across the country.
The waste, from the nation's 111 commercial nuclear power plants and a handful of federally owned reactors, is stored temporarily on racks submerged in pools of water at the plants.And the U.S. government has made little progress in developing a permanent dump for its commercial nuclear waste.
Congress three years ago selected Yucca Mountain in southwestern Nevada as the site for a permanent underground repository. But nearly every politician in that state is opposed to siting the repository there, saying Nevada itself has no nuclear power plants and most of those plants creating the waste are thousands of miles away.
The state has fought the plan in court and successfully delayed the scheduled opening of the site to at least 2010.
David Leroy, former Idaho lieutenant governor and now the country's first nuclear-waste negotiator, has been charged by Congress with the task of finding a state or Indian tribe willing to temporarily or permanently store the radioactive waste.
Leroy said if Nevada continues to fight the Yucca Mountain siting, he will cross the state off his "friendlies list."
He has not, however, ruled out using eminent domain to force a state to accept a waste repository.
"The spent fuel at the commercial plants and national defense reservations cannot permanently be lodged," he said. "If we fail in finding a site, we may have no alternative but to return to the politics of forced siting."
Currently, commercial nuclear waste also is not eligible to be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the Energy Department's repository in Carlsbad, N.M.
WIPP's five-year test phase is due to begin sometime this year, and is designed to measure the levels of gas given off by the radioactive waste from the nation's weapons facilities.
Bernie Pleau, manager of media relations for Westinghouse, which will operate WIPP, said the tests will help determine whether WIPP can be used as a permanent site to bury waste from weapons plants in salt beds 2,150 feet underground.
Once commercial nuclear reactors have outlived their usefulness, they are decommissioned. As midwestern and southwestern states argued over siting for new low-level radioactive waste disposals, the government's Hanford nuclear reservation was tagged as the current best option for burying the waste from those plants, according to officials of U.S. Ecology, which manages the Hanford civilian waste site.
Penny Phelps, a spokesperson for Westinghouse-Hanford, disagrees with U.S. Ecology's assessment, saying Hanford will not become a de facto site for other's used reactors.
This year, the Pathfinder nuclear reactor in South Dakota is scheduled to become the first commercial reactor bound for a civilian graveyard at Hanford. A special train, traveling at 35 mph through Montana and Idaho, will bring the 250-ton reactor from Sioux Falls to eastern Washington.
And Barry Bede, West Coast manager of governmental affairs for U.S. Ecology, said other commercial reactors could follow Pathfinder to Hanford as their operating licenses expire.
The three other reactors that may be buried at Hanford in future decades include the Trojan nuclear power plant near Portland and the Washington Public Power Supply System's No. 2 reactor at Hanford.
It might also receive wastes from the Fort St. Vrain reactor in Colorado.