The quiet fight to finally send nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain

The negotiations to pass a fiscal 2018 spending bill this month include a quiet effort by a Republican lawmaker from Illinois to restart plans to store the nation’s nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

There are no nuclear power plants in Rep. John Shimkus’s district in the southeastern region of the state. But the long-decommissioned Zion nuclear plant in northern Illinois is home to stored waste that Shimkus said would be better off moved to Yucca Mountain, which the federal government chose three decades ago to serve as the repository for all of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel.