While we agree with Richard B. Stewart, in his Article, Solving the U.S. Nuclear Waste Dilemma, on some crucial issues--most notably that the national process for developing a geologic repository for disposal nuclear waste is currently a mess--we have a substantially different perspective on the reasons for the mess and the path forward.

I. Background on Geologic Repositories

As Stewart describes, efforts to geologically isolate high-level nuclear waste began more than forty years ago. The National Academy of Sciences in 1957 reported that a number of geologic disposal alternatives were possible, but indicated a preference for disposal in salt. In 1967, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) proposed Project Salt Vault, a plan to develop a geologic repository in the Carey salt mine at Lyons, Kansas. This plan was abandoned by the AEC in the early 1970s after the Kansas Geological Survey mounted a strong campaign against the site, pointing out that the area had been subjected to extensive exploratory drilling for oil and gas deposits, and noting that an adjacent salt mine could not account for the loss of a large volume of water used during solution mining of the salt.