Canisters packed with old reac tor fuel would be entombed in the middle, making the mountain a veritable nuclear-waste mausole um. Next year, if all goes as planned, the energy department is to make a formal recommendation on the project to the White House. D.C. Congress even has funded the Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office, a state office that often seems more at odds with what the govern ment wants to do than in harmony with it. Polls circu lated by the office consis tently show 70 to 75 per cent of the residents against the project. But the waste continues to pile up at each plant, either in underwater spent-fuel pools or in outdoor storage vaults.
Costs continue to rise, as more waste is moved outside each plant.
Mich. Legislation was introduced in each of the last two years for the government to pick up the waste and store it on an interim basis at the test site. But the Clinton administration has been reluctant to embrace any interim proposal, on the grounds that it would slow the momentum for a permanent site. The Blade, All Rights Reserved.