For longer than Barack Obama has been alive, the United States has been a country without a formal plan to deal with long-term nuclear waste. Some nations, like Spain, bury it underground. Others, like France, reprocess some used fuel to suck the maximum amount of juice from it. But America, well, simply stalls.
There are costs to that stalling. A government panel appointed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu released a report Monday taking the United States’s lackadaisical attitude to task. “Put simply, this nation’s failure to come to grips with the nuclear waste issue has already proved damaging and costly,” wrote the panel, which was led by Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, and Brent Scowcroft, a national security adviser to two Republican presidents.