After nearly a decade of inaction on moving ahead with a permanent spent nuclear fuel repository at Yucca Mountain, an effort to bring an interim solution for the storage of radioactive fuel from commercially operated nuclear power plants is gaining momentum.

In the process, the Holtec International proposal for New Mexico unintentionally poses an age-old question: which came first, the chicken or the egg -or, in this instance, a repository or the transportation plan to get the spent fuel there.