A quarter century ago, the US government decided that Yucca Mountain, Nevada would be where we would store all of our deadly nuclear waste. So where is our deadly nuclear waste today? Oh, just spread out all over the place.

Bloomberg's Brian Wingfield surveys the state of our nation's comically nonexistent nuclear waste disposal system and finds that... well, that there is no real nuclear waste disposal system.

Since 1998, the U.S. government has been required by law to remove nuclear waste from plants and haul it to a secure disposal site — though it hasn’t because none has been built. Congress in 1987 designated one for Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, a project that President Barack Obama’s administration cut funding for in 2010 at the urging of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

That means that 30 states in the union have nuclear power plants that just store their own waste right there on site, and then sue the federal government for their storage costs, which total billions of dollars. Also, needless to say, the plants see this all as a temporary measure, so they store the deadly waste as cheaply as they can. So, in conclusion, our nation's nuclear waste disposal system is essentially a slow-moving political, economic, and environmental disaster.

Especially for Illinois, which has more nuclear waste than any state. Because Illinois is a dump.

[Photo: AP]