Nevada’s governor and five of its six members of Congress have already come out swinging against the latest attempt to revive Yucca Mountain. “Republican, Democrat, independent—there is enormous opposition to Yucca Mountain,” said Robert Halstead, executive director of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects.

* * *

The state’s objections to Yucca Mountain originate with how it got chosen in the first place. When Reagan signed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the country’s nuclear weapons program had left tons of radioactive waste, and spent fuel from nuclear power plants was also piling up. The law directed the Energy Department to study several sites around the country, but politicians didn’t want to pay for the expensive and lengthy technical assessments of all the potential sites. So in 1987, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to designate Yucca Mountain as the one permanent storage site.

Why Nevada? The three finalist sites were in Texas, Washington, and Nevada. At the time, the speaker of the House represented Texas and the majority leader Washington. The amendment became known as the Screw Nevada Bill. “Clearly, the mistake we made in 1987 was jamming it down the throat of the Nevadans,” a government official later told Nature.

Nevadans also have safety concerns. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that approves radioactive-waste storage sites, published a long-delayed report in 2014 deeming Yucca Mountain safe. But critics worry that groundwater in Yucca Mountain could corrode the canisters that store nuclear waste, causing a radioactive leak.

Planning a 10,000-year storage site is bound to be complicated; if built, it would need to last longer than any piece of infrastructure in history. But efforts really sputtered out after Reid became Senate majority leader and Obama took office—both of whom are opposed to the project. They never had enough votes to outright kill it, despite Reid’s boasts, because Yucca Mountain was written into law. So they stalled.

“The Obama administration was a paper exercise,” said Blee. “At the end of the day it succeeded in generating a lot of paper but no concrete action.” For example, the Energy Department needs a license to build Yucca Mountain from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In 2010, Obama’s energy department tried to withdraw its application for Yucca Mountain. The NRC voted 2-2 on whether the department could actually withdraw it, which resolved nothing. Meanwhile, Washington simply stopped funding the offices working on Yucca Mountain. Staff were reassigned, and offices emptied out.

The Obama administration also appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission on nuclear waste that recommended a “consent-based process” for finding a new location in a state that was not so vigorously opposed to it. That process never got off the ground.