What’s next for Yucca? Restoration

When it was on the drawing boards, the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste dump promised unprecedented challenges to nuclear engineers and physicists: How to safely store nuclear waste underground? Now with the project being killed by President Barack Obama, the site will offer unprecedented challenges to desert ecologists: How to bring vegetation back to the mountain? The task is both simple and overwhelming: Under federal law, the Energy Department has to return the mountain landscape to a state similar to how the agency found it. That’s easier said than done, because fully restoring a desert landscape can take centuries, or millennia. Although desert landscape restoration has been attempted with varying degrees of success in recent years, there has never been a desert reclamation project of this size and type...read more

COMMENT

Do they really think the feds will comply with the law and restore the area?

Restoration will taken money, i.e., Congressional appropriations. It will be very easy for DOE & Congress to find other priorities for the money.

Either that, or they will throw big bucks at the project, most of which will be wasted by the DOE.

Either way, a satisfactory restoration is not likely.