KVIG Informative

The federal government spent nearly four decades and more than $15 billion building the case that Yucca Mountain was the only place in America fit to hold the nation’s spent nuclear fuel. This summer, the Energy Department started building that case somewhere else.

The Energy Department recommended the Yucca Mountain site, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to the president as a candidate location for a permanent nuclear waste repository on May 27, 1986, under section 112(b)(1)(B) of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. That process was originally designed to compare candidate sites against each other before a final selection.

Congress cut the comparison short. On Dec. 22, 1987, lawmakers enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1987 as Title V, Subtitle A of a budget reconciliation law, Public Law 100-203, naming Yucca Mountain the only site the Energy Department could study for a permanent repository. The same law repealed a separate provision that had called for a second repository somewhere in the eastern United States.

A companion provision in the 1987 law cut off site-study assistance payments to every state except Nevada, formalizing that Nevada alone remained in contention. Nevada hosted no commercial nuclear reactors of its own and had no nuclear industry generating the waste the repository was meant to hold.

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Nevada’s elected officials fought the designation for the next three decades. Sen. Harry Reid was a freshman senator from Nevada when Congress passed the 1987 law. He later became Senate majority leader and used that position to help block funding for the project.

Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn issued a formal notice of disapproval of the Yucca Mountain site on April 8, 2002, after President George W. Bush recommended the site that February. Both chambers of Congress voted to override Guinn’s veto by that summer, clearing the way for a license application the Energy Department filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008.

Funding collapsed within a few years of that filing. The Obama administration moved to end the project, and by 2011 the licensing effort had been abandoned without a repository ever being built. The Government Accountability Office later put total federal spending on the site at roughly $15 billion.

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The Energy Department signaled this year that it has moved on. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced in May 2025 that the agency would pursue an opt-in approach to siting nuclear facilities, relying on the consent of host communities rather than a congressionally mandated location. On Aug. 4, 2026, the department named Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Idaho as initial contenders to host what it calls Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses, selected from 28 applications submitted by 26 states.

Nevada’s current officials read the announcement as confirmation of what they had argued for decades. Gov. Joe Lombardo said it showed a willingness to finally move beyond the Yucca Mountain project. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said Yucca Mountain is dead, and Rep. Dina Titus called the five-state selection a monumental victory, saying Nevada is no longer targeted for waste it did not create. Richard Bryan, chairman of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects and a former Nevada governor and U.S. senator, called the shift a victory for common sense and said Congress should still pass legislation establishing a transparent site-selection process.

The 1987 law that made Yucca Mountain the nation’s only legal candidate site remains on the books. Only Congress can change it, and nothing signed this year has touched it. Nevada’s fight outlasted the site it was built to stop; whether that fight has actually ended depends on a Congress that has not yet voted to say so.