Construction of new dry cask storage systems for high-level nuclear waste is a responsible attempt by Nebraska’s two nuclear power plants to cope with a real problem.

It’s too bad that this step is necessary.

By now, the spent nuclear rods ought to be safely buried in a national waste site.

The proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was supposed to open in 1998. But it’s still snarled in legal battles and shackled by congressional dysfunction.

Last week, the Department of Energy announced that the facility would begin accepting fuel in 2017. Judging by the history of the proposal, that date once again will be pushed back.

Environmentalists and Nevada residents contend that the Yucca Mountain site is not safe enough. Others claim that transportation of fuel rods will create “mobile Chernobyls.”

Opponents of the Yucca Mountain site exaggerate those risks and trivialize the risks of leaving the waste at places such as Cooper Nuclear Station near Brownville and the Fort Calhoun Station near Omaha.

The two plants are among 31 scattered across the United States that are “temporarily” storing about 50,000 tons of radioactive waste.

The Fort Calhoun station already has built a $23 million system. Its concrete bunkers have two-foot-thick walls containing stainless steel canisters, each filled with fuel rods and fuel assemblies. The canisters are filled with helium to prevent corrosion.

Nebraska Public Power District announced recently that it plans to spend about $45 million to build a similar facility.

Meanwhile, about $8 billion has been spent studying and preparing the Yucca Mountain site. About 2,000 scientists and staff work at the laboratory on the site.

It probably is the most scientifically studied piece of real estate in the world. Study after study has deemed it safe for storage of nuclear waste in vaults about 1,000 feet underground in solid rock.

In recent decades, opponents of nuclear energy have succeeded in preventing construction of new plants. But use of nuclear energy to generate electricity has one advantage over coal-fired plants. It contributes far less to global warming.

That has led environmentalists such as Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, to advocate a switch to more nuclear power plants.

The changing balance of power has led some members of Congress to propose that the rest of the approval process for Yucca Mountain be streamlined.

Let’s hope that those efforts are successful. The “temporary” storage of spent nuclear fuel at power plants is a poor alternative to burying it for thousands of years under solid rock.