America’s favorite problem to ignore—what to do with radioactive waste—just got worse. Since 1987, the grand (and controversial) idea was to put it all in one place, a series of tunnels deep below Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Well, last week America got three new national monuments, including the 704,000 acres of the Basin and Range National Monument. And guess what? The train that was supposed to carry all that nuclear guck to Yucca Mountain runs right through it.

“It’s another nail in the coffin for Yucca Mountain,” says Timothy Frazier, a former Department of Energy official who now works on nuclear waste for the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It certainly adds time, and would require more money to resolve.”

For the past several years, Yucca Mountain has been a political hot potato—dare I even say it's radioactive? It's a real mess. Yucca Mountain was supposed to be a place to safely store radioactive waste from power plants and weapons production for the next 10,000 years. The state of Nevada, however, was not happy with being America’s nuclear dump. It filed a lawsuit that dragged out planning and building. Senate leader Harry Reid—from Nevada—and President Obama both opposed the repository. The whole idea has been mothballed.

But radioactive waste doesn’t disappear if you ignore it. The US has 75,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste—spent reactor fuel and the byproducts of processing it—that now sit in pools or dry casks at nuclear power plants, facilities never intended for long-term storage. The risk of leaks is high. Because the stuff stays radioactive for millennia, the safest course of action is supposed to be entomb ingit in rock like at Yucca Mountain, where it can remain inaccessible to future humans.

Now, Yucca Mountain plans have dragged on so long that all the high-level radioactive waste in the country exceeds its storage capacity. The Department of Energy hasn’t even built the repository yet, and the country already needs a second.

With a different Congress and a different president, there could be a Yucca Mountain revival. Republicans have advocated for it. In that case, there could be alternative rail routes to the repository, according to Gary Lanthrum, an engineer who directed the office that worked on Yucca Mountain’s transportation plan.

DOE/BLM/WIRED

Lanthrum’s office had assessed several different potential rail alignments, eventually settling the so-called Caliente route, which is the one that now runs through Basin and Range. Caliente came out on top because it passed through land already owned by the federal government. Incidentally, the fact this was public land made it easy to convert to a national monument, as President Obama did last just week. Now, it’ll very difficult politically to argue for tearing up the protected land with a railroad, much less one for carrying radioactive waste.

Other possible routes to Yucca Mountain, like the Mina, are actually shorter and pass through fewer mountains. But they posed other problems. For example, the Mina rail alignment cuts through the Walker River Indian reservation, which has opposed the nuclear transportation line in the past. Other routes also pass through more private land, creating extra hurdles for building a railroad.

Nobody wants radioactive waste to be their problem, and it ends up being, well, everyone's problem. The federal government has paid $4.5 billion to keep high-level waste at nuclear power plants, and it's on track to spend another $22.6 billion. At the same time, the plans for Yucca Mountain are all drawn up and and even its initial tunnels have been drilled. “The technical solutions are ready to be implemented when the political will reasserts itself,” says Lanthrum.