The decision by the Trump administration to spend $120 million to restart the process to use Nevada's Yucca Mountain to safely and permanently store radioactive waste is great news.  If Congress agrees, and it must, President Trump's plan will implement a law enacted by a bipartisan Congress and signed by President Reagan and will create high-paying jobs – 3,650 during construction (as $228 million is added annually to Nevada's economy) and over 2,000 during operations (as $127 million annually goes into the economy) – while saving taxpayers billions of dollars.  It will also prevent the use of these materials in acts of terrorism.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law, ordered the safe storage and disposal of radioactive waste.  In 1987, Nevada's Yucca Mountain was selected as the best site after decades of Intensive Site Characterization Studies.  Then, from 1987 to 2002, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) spent $3.8 billion on further scientific and technical studies of Yucca Mountain.  The Act required the DOE to begin moving spent fuel to a repository no later than 1998, but in 2002, Nevada vetoed the site, an action that was overridden that year by Congress.

Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, however, at the behest of Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Obama administration proposed eliminating funds for the Yucca Mountain project and, ignoring the decades of scientific study, created a Blue Ribbon Commission to consider anew ways to handle America's nuclear waste.  Worse yet, the DOE tried to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)'s Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding but was stopped by an August of 2013 federal appeals court ruling that the DOE was flouting the law.

Meanwhile, Senator Reid's man at the NRC, Chairman Gregory Jaczko, directed staff to begin the orderly closure of Yucca Mountain activities, including ending work on the Safety Evaluation Report (SER) that contains staff's conclusions about the Yucca Mountain site's suitability.  Nonetheless, in October of 2014, the NRC released SER's Volume III, which found that THE DOE's license application for Yucca Mountain meets long-term nuclear waste repository regulatory and safety requirements, and that Yucca Mountain disposal would remain safe for one million years!  Unfortunately, any national security pressure on the Obama administration to press forward with Yucca Mountain died when, with a gun to its head, Sandia National Laboratories concluded that the risk that terrorists would access and utilize nuclear waste was inconclusive.  Experts familiar with the issue were stunned at the assertion.

All the while – that is, since 1982 – the DOE has collected $40 billion from electricity consumers to build and operate Yucca Mountain, even after it killed the Nevada site and has no planned and viable alternative.  In 2013, a federal court ordered the DOE to stop collecting the fees; however, the government still has the money.  That is not all; energy companies forced to stow the waste Congress told the DOE to put in Nevada sued the DOE and so far have won over two billion dollars.  The Congressional Research Service estimates that these court awards will exceed $20 billion by 2020 and then will cost taxpayers $500 million annually.  Small wonder that, in December of 2015, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners told Congress to do what even Obama officials could not prevent its Blue Ribbon Commission from demanding: prompt efforts to develop one or more geologic disposal facilities.

Today, 160,000 spent fuel assemblies, containing 45,000 tons of spent fuel from nuclear power plants, are in storage across the country; 156,500 are at power plants, like the waste from the shuttered San Onofre plant in southern California.  There, a handful of armed guards, still awaiting NRC policy on when they may fire their weapons, have orders only to deter, detect, and flee when they encounter threats.  Fleeing a terrorist attack involving nuclear waste may work for them, but it won't work for the 13 million men, women, and children in Los Angeles less than 50 miles away.

Faster, please!  

William Perry Pendley, an attorney, is president of Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver and author of Sagebrush Rebel:  Reagan's Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today (Regnery, 2013).