South Carolina Sues over Yucca Mountain

On Wednesday, an appellate court panel will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit filed by South Carolina and Washington state seeking an end to a political stalemate over the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository.

Here's my favorite line from the article in discussing what happens until the Court rules:

Until that decision is made, nothing can move forward unless Congress decides to act.

Right. Because Congress is all about "acting" on stuff. I think it would be safe to say "Until a decision is made, nothing can move forward." Full stop.

What's the deal with Yucca Mountain anyway? Wasn't it originally designed to be a nuclear waste storage facility? All the waste has to go somewhere, and putting it under a mountain in the Western US desert seems like a good as place as any. If Nevada doesn't want to store nuclear waste, that's fine, but why did they start doing this in the first place? Seems like South Carolina and a bunch of other states relied (to their detriment) on the promise that Yucca Mountain was going to take all this waste off their hands.

Also, why is nuclear the n-word in the headline of the article? Are we not supposed to say nuclear?