Each of the Democratic candidates in the last presidential election, as part of the Nevada primary, had an opportunity to declare their everlasting hatred for the idea that “nuclear waste” would ever be stored at a remote site of desert called Yucca Mountain.

Eventually one of them was elected.

And he carried through on his promise, essentially bypassing the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and billions of dollars of investment by saying that Yucca Mountain wouldn’t ever be opened and that “nuclear waste” wouldn’t be stored there.

There’s a little problem with that, see–each of the utilities that operate nuclear reactors have been paying a dollar of tax for each megawatt-hour of electricity they’ve generated since the early 1980s. That $1/MW*hr has really added up since then, to the tune of about $25 billion.

So President Obama appointed a “Blue Ribbon Commission” made up of several former politicians, some political activists, some utility types, and one nuclear engineer to determine what we should do if we weren’t going to build Yucca Mountain. The commission was announced in February 2010 and has been meeting and taking testimony and holding public meetings on a regular basis since then. Now they’re expected to report their recommendations:

1. Store all the spent nuclear fuel in one place somewhere…temporarily.

2. Build something very much like…Yucca Mountain.

Which really makes you wonder a bit why we spent $10 billion designing and testing Yucca Mountain only to abandon it. The administration is pretty vague on this point, saying that the “science wasn’t there” whereas many people I’ve spoken to in the nuclear industry tell me it’s the most studied place on the planet.

I’m a bit on the fence myself. For years I opposed Yucca Mountain for the reason that I’m fairly convinced that “nuclear waste” isn’t really waste at all, but potentially untapped wealth. I didn’t think we should go toss all that barely-consumed nuclear fuel in the ground. But if the Blue Ribbon Commission is going to say we need a “geologic repository” like Yucca Mountain, well then, why not Yucca Mountain?

Seems to me that $10 billion is an awfully large amount of money to go to waste.