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At some point, you or someone you know will benefit from a little-known radioactive isotope with a name that sounds like something out of a Spider-Man comic book -- technetium-99m. Doctors rely on it to diagnose conditions such as heart disease and bone cancer.

Nevada GOP Comic

"President Obama has big plans for the future of commercial nuclear energy but the industry still has to deal with the waste it's generated over the past 50 years. The administration has pulled the plug on the Yucca Mountain repository so, today, half a century of radioactive waste remains at power plants. That's costing taxpayers and ratepayers billions of dollars a year. Living on Earth's Bruce Gellerman investigates the flow of federal funds and nuclear waste in the second story in our series. YOUNG: You might call it a money meltdown. For decades the federal government promised to permanently bury that high-level nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada. And utility consumers paid the government billions of dollars to do that. But the Obama administration wants to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain - while at the same time promising 54 billion dollars in federal loan guarantees to build new reactors. That means nuclear utility companies have to continue to store the spent fuel rods on site - often in pools of water and increasingly in special dry casks."