Pledges by politicians are about as useful as the methane they blow out their a$$e$. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1986 set the framework for management of "spent" fuel in this country. A Presidential candidate can pander to the anti-nuke kooks all they want about Yucca Mountain, but unless the NWPA legislation is repealed or amended, the President can't unilaterally change the policy. There would be a court challenge and the President would lose.
If we were really serious about a constructive and practical solution to waste management, we would lift the ban on fuel reprocessing in this country and also implement full actinide recycle with the recovered Pu as fuel for LWRs. Waste partitioning alone isn't going to cut it. Partitioning with actinide recycle will.
“Then the opposition to the site was just in my imagination? “
Of coruse there was/is opposition. But the opposition has no basis in reality, or at least real immediate concerns...
The entire county in which Yucca mountain resides has a population of 1400!
http://www.yuccamountain.org/trends06/pop.htm
“Eureka County has an extremely low population density - only 0.34 persons per square mile, as compared to 22 persons per square mile for Nevada as a whole, and 83.8 persons per square mile nationwide. 51% of the estimated 2005 county population of 1,485 resided in the town of Eureka or Crescent Valley, so the actual population density of areas outside of these towns is considerably lower than 0.34 persons per square mile. This is typical of and consistent with the rest of rural northern Nevada, where population tends to be clustered around small towns and cities which grew up as mining towns, local commerce centers serving the surrounding rural areas, or railroad camps. In addition, approximately 81% of Eureka County land is federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, making these areas presently unavailable for settlement. “