Round up: Brown down on Yucca; SONGS district looks blue; U.K. cleanup inefficient

The Republican candidate for Nevada’s contested U.S. Senate Seat, Sam Brown, said the magic words again during a debate with incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.). “Yucca Mountain is dead.”

Brown, who found himself on the wrong side of the politically charged issue earlier in his race, said in 2022 that developing Yucca could be a good source of revenue for Nevada. He later said he “educated himself” on the issue and subsequently opposed developing a permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste at Yucca. He trails Rosen in recent polling.

California’s 49th House district, home of the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, looked comfortably Democratic in the election, first-week October polls show.

Except for a few polls commissioned by the campaign of the Republican candidate in the race,  which show a virtual dead heat, a database maintained by the website 538 shows incumbent Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) with a lead of about 10% over Matt Gunderson (R). 

In a non-partisan district primary in March, Levin, the co-chair of the House Spent Nuclear Fuel Solutions (SNFS) Caucus, got more than twice as many votes as Gunderson.

Sellafield Ltd., a subsidiary of the U.K.-government-owned Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, still is not efficiently spending money at the country’s largest nuclear cleanup, the U.K.’s National Audit Office reported this week. 

It will cost more than $175 billion and take until 2125 to clean up the roughly 4.3 million cubic yards of radioactive waste at Sellafield, according to the audit office. That is nearly 19% higher, after adjusting for inflation, than an estimate the office reported on in 2019. 

The audit office is similar to the Government Accountability Office in the U.S. The U.K. stores most of its separated plutonium at Sellafield. Sellafield Ltd., once a private contractor team led by URS, now Amentum, was folded back into the U.K. government in 2016.