Frank von Hippel has a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times arguing that storing nuclear waste — e.g. at Yucca Mountain — is a much safer alternative than reprocessing it. His conclusion, however, would never work in the United States:

The U.S. made the mistake with Yucca Mountain of trying to force a repository on an unwilling state. One alternative would be to follow the path of Finland and Sweden, which have placed their underground repositories in communities that already host nuclear power plants. They have found that once people in a community have accepted a nuclear facility, they view the addition of an underground repository as a relatively minor issue.

Yeah. A “minor issue.”