The US Energy Department has applied for a license to operate a long-delayed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman announced on Tuesday. Bodman said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will take about three years to review and decide whether to approve the license request for the Yucca Mountain storage facility, which was supposed to have opened in 1998. The earliest Yucca Mountain could open is 2020, the department said. The Yucca Mountain storage site, about 90 miles (145 km) from Las Vegas, has endured years of bureaucratic delays and scientific foul-ups. The government needs a license from the NRC to operate the fuel dump when it is ready. "Submittal of the Yucca Mountain license application will further encourage the expansion of nuclear power in the United States, which is absolutely critical to our energy security, environmental goals, and national security," said Bodman. "We are confident that the NRC's rigorous review process will confirm that the Yucca Mountain repository will provide for the safe disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste and will be protective of human health and the environment now and into the future," he added. The department's license application runs 8,600 pages. "We are ready to get to work on this challenging review," said NRC Chairman Dale Klein. He said the agency's review will involve over 100 NRC staff and contractor employees. Yucca Mountain is designed to store millions of pounds of radioactive waste from 104 US nuclear power reactors underground, along with tons of leftovers from the country's nuclear weapons program. Currently, spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste is stored at 121 temporary locations in 39 states across the country. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's main lobby group, welcomed the department's license request. However, the group also called for interim storage of the waste until the permanent Yucca storage site is ready or the US develops a program to reprocess spent fuel. "The filing of this license application continues down a path to properly meet our obligation to future generations to safely and reliably manage the by-product of this highly efficient form of electricity production," said NEI president Frank Bowman. (Reporting by Tom Doggett; Editing by Marguerita Choy) REUTERS NEWS SERVICE