Homeless nuclear waste

Standing on the end of Bailey Point, looking out on a cold, blue inlet of the Atlantic, you'd never know a nuclear power plant once stood here. The massive concrete containment dome, the spent fuel storage pool, and the six-story-high turbine hall were all torn down earlier this decade, leaving a rain-soaked meadow of grass. The engineers and technicians who tended the 900-megawatt reactor packed up and left town a decade ago, when the Maine Yankee Atomic Power Station stopped producing power. All that's left is radioactive waste: the remains of the plant's reactor vessel lining and the 1,435 spent fuel assemblies that passed through it over a quarter century of operations. It has nowhere else to go.