Five U.S. Reps traveled to Nevada Thursday to visit Yucca Mountain - a site that was intended to be the nation's nuclear waste repository before the federal government cut funding to it in 2010.
Reps. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., Bob Latta, R-Ohio, Cresent Hardy and Mark Amodei, both Republicans from Nevada, and Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., toured the site and were expected to talk about its viability to house the nation's waste.
Before the project was halted, estimates are that about $15 billion was spent drilling a 5-mile, U-shaped tunnel and studying whether 77,000 tons of hazardous material could remain safe and dry in casks wheeled on rails into a honeycomb of tunnels 1,000 feet underground. Some estimates put the final cost at $100 billion.
Nevada has opposed the project for more than 30 years.
The trip came after a March 24 announcement that the Department of Energy is looking for separate repositories for spent fuel and high-level radioactive nuclear waste - two waste forms that Yucca would have housed together. The Energy Department received that direction from President Barack Obama with an added duty to begin a search for interim storage sites.
Now, the House Reps are holding discussions on Yucca, and Nevada's U.S. Nuclear Energy Foundation wrote that the move is a good one for Nevadans.
"Recent and past public polls show 70 percent of Nevadans are willing to "talk Yucca" and as with many political issues, straight talk is what we all need," wrote Gary Duarte, director of the foundation.
The trip comes after senior Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, announced his retirement. Reid, the Senate Minority Leader, has widely opposed the Yucca project, agreeing with Obama that the site is not suitable to house nuclear waste.
Despite that belief, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was tasked this past year with providing a series of safety evaluation reports on Yucca. The commission concluded in an October 2014 report that the Department of Energy's repository design meets the requirements and outlined objectives.
"These performance objectives include the requirement that the repository be composed of multiple barriers to isolate radioactivity from the environment," officials wrote in the report. "The staff also found the proposed repository design meets the NRC's limits or standards for individual protection, human intrusion and groundwater protection."
The report sparked support from both South Carolina residents and politicians, including Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who referenced shipping the waste from the Savannah River Site to Yucca Mountain.
"Every utility involved in the process has put in billions of dollars into Yucca so we should either use it or give the money back to the rate payers," Graham said last year after the safety report was released. "Also, it would allow us to move that defense waste at SRS which was part of the original plan anyway."
- The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Derrek Asberry is the SRS beat reporter for the Aiken Standard and has been with the paper since June 2013. He is originally from Vidalia, Ga., and a graduate of Georgia Southern University. Follow him on Twitter @DerrekAsberry.