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230 Fuel Cycle to Nowhere nadir in 1987 to its apogee in the 2008 elections. The long delay in the siting process, even after the 1987 designation of Yucca, ultimately enabled Nevada to take advantage of shifting political contingencies. The delay was the result of the inevitable complexity of the decision process, the division of regulatory authority over Yucca among three federal agencies, and Nevada’s determination in using litigation and other available tools to further slow the process. The political contingencies that favored Nevada included the fortuitous early timing of the Nevada Democratic presidential primary, the lack of a commanding Democratic front-runner, and Harry Reid’s position in the Senate. But underlying these contingencies lies the powerful if unpredictable role of local issues and interests in U.S. national politics and policies, and the enduring strength of the political safeguards of federalism that ultimately defeated Congress’s design, which would impose a repository on an unwilling host state. Conclusion Through NWPA, Congress sought to make up for thirty years of abject disregard, including its own, of the nation’s nuclear waste stockpiles by mandating a crash program for their permanent deposal. The means Congress chose were, in 1982, a centralized technocratic-meritocratic process administered by DOE and, in 1987, site determination by Congress itself together with the president. Both mechanisms failed. The top-down strategies that Congress selected to address the waste problem relied on the same centralized authoritarian approach that it had followed in creating and sustaining the AEC/ ERDA/DOE regime that produced the wastes and then neglected to deal with them. The failure of both the 1982 and 1987 NWPA blueprints, which ultimately relied on sheer federal power to force waste facilities on unwilling states, contrasts with the success of the far more flexible and improvisational approach that led to the successful development of WIPP with the eventual assent of New Mexico. The data points are too few to draw any definite conclusions from this experience. It is possible that the 1982 NWPA strategy could have succeeded had it provided a more realistic timetable, had it been implemented by DOE in a manner more open to and accommodating of the interests of potential host states, and had Congress stayed the course. It is also possible, although by no means certain, that the 1987 NWPA strategy could have produced a repository at Yucca but for the political contingencies that led to the election of Barack Obama as president and Harry Reid’s election to Senate majority leader. Any such success, however, might have been bought at a heavy price. It is doubtful that Congress would have been able to impose a second repository through the same method. Nonetheless, the available evidence indicates that, given the very strong safeguards of federalism in our polity, strategies reliant on unilateral federal imposition run a high risk of failure. As a result of the failures of both versions of NWPA, the nation again confronts its legacy of highly radioactive defense and civilian waste, this time without a plan or even—under current statutes—legal authority to develop a repository or a consolidated storage facility. ...

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