In the wake of preliminary findings from the administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, some House members this week pushed to reopen a high-level radioactive waste burial ground at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. During an Oct. 27 joint hearing by the Committee on Science, Space & Technology, Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight and Subcommittee on Energy & Environment, some members promoted not only new nuclear power plants but waste reprocessing. “If you put the people in the electronics industry in charge” you’d have better technologies, said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who wants the nation to establish nuclear waste reprocessing plants. Congress traditionally has viewed waste reprocessing as too much of a health and terrorist risk. In other nations, like at the Toaki plant in Japan, spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed. The main theme of the Blue Ribbon Commission draft proposals is to create a specific federal agency for handling nuclear waste in place of the current amalgam of the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The draft also asks for a “new integrated strategy” for managing the nuclear cycle’s “back end.” The commission envisions both interim and long-term disposal. Committee members did not object to a new agency but said they wanted the Department of Energy to continue with the Yucca Mountain waste dump. The agency halted Yucca Mountain in March 2010. Knowing that move was afoot, the administration established the Blue Ribbon Commission in January 2010. Another major finding in the draft commission report highlights the importance of cooperation with local governments and the resident population for any new long-term waste facility. “While there are a number of geological options that would work quite well, there are people problems. You have to build social trust,” Roger Kasperson, Clark University professor, told the lawmakers. Kasperson noted that a final repository is a “first of its kind” facility, and thus, an unknown factor for the public. “It has to be for 10,000 to 100,000 years,” he added. California nuclear power plant owners have built temporary on-site storage for spent fuel and other high-level radioactive waste from the plants. There was 2,850 tons of high-level radioactive waste stored in this state alone in 2010, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. The highest concentration of spent fuel is in Pennsylvania, with nearly 6,000 tons, according to industry.