This is one of several articles in the media elsewhere that have the lead of the story that this budget cancels the Yucca repository. The Obama administration has made clear that it intends to "terminate" the facility there, the government has yet do so. The site was approved by Congress and signed into law by the previous president (subject to getting a license from the NRC and, one imagines, court challenges.) Therefore it will take an act of Congress to cancel the project. Reid can't pull that off.

What is the rush? Well, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act said the government (DOE) must begin waste acceptance for disposal in a repository (which the Sun refers to as a "dump,") by January 1998. Further, DOE signed contracts promising commercial reactor owners that such disposal would begin then. DOE did not and got sued for breach of contracts. DOE now estimates the liability for that failure to be at least $12.3 billion. Taxpayers, including Nevadans, will foot the bill for that.
I doubt if "the industry" said that spent fuel is "too risky" to leave it where it is. What industry and technical experts more likely have said is that the waste cannot stay at reactor storage sites indefinitely. At the risk of being repititious, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act says so, too. If you don't like it, change the law.

Rep. Berkley refers to the $100 billion to build Yucca Mountain. That is not totally accurate. The July 2008 Total Systems Life Cycle Cost report from DOE estimates $96.2 billion to build a repository at Yucca for 122,100 metric tons of waste. But, present law limits the capacity to 70,000 metric tons. DOE assumed for purposes of analysis that Congress would either lift the limit or that a second repository would have comparable costs. Nowhere in the TSLCC is there a cost estimate for a 70,000 ton repository.

Chu and President Obama say the Yucca repository will be "terminated" and is now "dead." There seems to be an unanswered question as to the authority that the Administration has to make that judgment. In 2002, when Congress overrode former Governor Guinn's "veto" of the designation of Yucca as a suitable repository site, subject to obtaining a license from the NRC, that resolution became Public Law 107-200.

In similar letters, 18 senators and two ranking members of House committees asked Secretary Chu to provide Congress the scientific and legal basis for the decision that Yucca is "not an option." Since ratepayers have paid close to $30 billion in fees and interest for disposal that was to have begun 11 years ago, they need answers to those questions as well.

Aww...Obama gets coerced to make a pledge to stop the Yucca Mountain repository to placate Reid and gain some votes in Nevada and now that he follows through, the State is crying that it can't get enough money from the Nuclear Waste Fund to continue the State's further efforts to defeat the project the President calls "terminated." Yeh, that seems fair.

Future 2012 asks a good question, I believe that no budget line item will be shown in the Budget for refunds to ratepayers or to the utilities which made the payments for disposal that was promised in contracts with the federal government but now in greater doubt than ever. What is happening is that most of the nuclear utilities are suing the government over that breach of contract. There have been some settlements but in most cases the courts are still determining how much the government must pay. When damages or settlements are set, the payments are made from a curious budget element called the Judgment Fund. What is curious about it is that no one seems to manage the Fund. Instead, the Department of Justice tells Department of Treasury who to pay how much. The money is replenished through a difficult to determine manner, but the point here is that it does not come out of the Department of Energy or any other agency's budget.

2012 may also know that Senators Graham and McCain have introduced a bill that would require the President to accept Yucca as the disposal site or rebate the balance of the Nuclear Waste Fund. It is doubtful that such a bill will pass but the matter should be debated.

airweare says we should forgo nuclear power and cites some of the familiar but unsubstantiated reasons. For one, he/she says "nuclear power" wanted to develop commercial peaceful uses of atomic energy after Hiroshima/Nagasaki. It is pretty well documented that President Eisenhower promoted it and that the electric utilities were reluctant as they were pleased with coal and oil.
But if airweare has his way, does he/she prefer coal, which is the other fuel best suited for 24/7 baseload power (assuming no more hydro is likely?) We are seeing the concerns about carbon emissions from coal and other fossil fuels. Coal plants also are the largest source of mercury emissions a 1,000MW coal plant disperses about 27 metric tons of radioactive material a year exposing people to much more low-level radiation than a nuclear plant would.
The fact is that there is risk in all energy production. The strict regulation of nuclear reactors is far greater than at other energy facilities.

The reporter senses a "shift in thinking" about Yucca and suggests that the law no longer requires construction of the repository. Yes, there may be revised thinking and writing, but I disagree that anything has changed with respect to the law. The law (the Nuclear Waste Policy Act as amended) requires disposal in a geologic repository and the law (P.L. 107-200, the 2002 joint resolution of Congress overriding former Governor Guinn's veto of the site approval) requires the next step to be the decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on whether to approve the license application submitted by the Dept. of Energy last June. President Obama's position on the project has not changed the law and it is an open question as to how the project can be stopped altogether other than by the NRC denying a license.

The "whining" you refer to has to do with the decision by the Obama Administration to follow through on the President's 2007 statements that "legitimate scientific questions" have been raised about the safety of disposal of nuclear waste at Yucca and therefore "it is no longer sustainable federal policy" to consider Yucca for a permanent repository.
Let us recall the timing of that statement. It was sent to the chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee the day before a hearing was scheduled by the chairwoman at the request of Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Obama's rival for Nevada caucus votes. Does anyone think Obama had some special scientific knowledge that led him to judge that there were legitimate scientific questions aside from those he may have been furnished by the State of Nevada?

There are questions to be examined in the proposed repository and there is a process for the consideration of those questions in an unbiased process by technically qualified people at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Department of Energy, supported by the National Laboratories, other federal agencies and a host of contractors has submitted the license application (that few outside government seem to have actually read) that makes the case that the repository they hope to build will meet the radiation regulatory requirements and other regulations. The State of Nevada can and will challenge those arguments with their own contentions. The NRC license review, which may take 3 to 4 years, is the way for "science to rule the day."

Please be more careful when writing about nuclear waste reprocessing. You say "some" people see reprocessing as an alternative to storage. If we were to shift to a reprocessing approach for spent nuclear fuel in this country--and I agree it would take decades to bring it into production scale-- we would still need a repository, at Yucca or somewhere else:
1. For the unreclaimable waste products of reprocessing.
2. For the defense-related waste that cannot be reprocessed.
Russia, France and Japan reprocess spent fuel AND they each plan to build a repository.