High-level radioactive waste disposal was the star attraction at the Atomic Industrial Forum's recent nuclear fuel cycle conference in New Orleans. No fewer than nine papers were devoted to high-level waste and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA). Officials of the Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, charged with establishing and operating a waste management and disposal system by 1998, outlined what they considered to be their progress and described their plans for meeting the 1998 target date. Utility, state, and legal representatives highlighted what they considered to be delays, shortcomings, and major obstacles. But it fell to Darrell F. Newman, manager of the commercial spent fuel management program at DOE's Pacific Northwest Laboratory (Richland, Wash.), to quantify the problem that utilities are facing with their spent nuclear fuel while they wait for 1998 to get here. Some utilities, Newman says, are running out of space to store spent fuel ...