Idahoans have been adamant on one point: They don’t want their state to become a dump for nuclear waste.

Fifteen years ago, they spoke clearly. With a resounding 62.5 percent majority, they voted to ratify then-Gov. Phil Batt’s waste cleanup agreement. A central selling point: The agreement calls for removing all spent nuclear reactor fuels from Idaho by 2035.

What has changed since that 1996 vote? The federal government is now much more desperate to find a home for used reactor fuels — not just those already at the Idaho National Laboratory, but those scattered at more than 100 commercial reactor sites from coast to coast.

In fact, the feds are probably further from a storage solution than they were in 1996. Back then, and for more than a decade that followed, the feds fixed their focus on Yucca Mountain, a remote ridge about 100 miles north of Las Vegas. But the Obama administration has abruptly abandoned Yucca Mountain — a political plum for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and fellow Yucca Mountain opponents, but a hasty move that leaves the feds scrambling for a Plan B.

Should Idaho be the solution to the federal government’s problem?

Some Idahoans, particularly those in eastern Idaho, would say yes. They think storage of this waste, even on a temporary basis, could create jobs at the nearby INL and pose no risk to the environment. There isn’t an overt effort to push to make the INL a storage destination — just a desire, for now at least, to put it on the table for discussion.

Fair enough. Let’s discuss it. But unless something has dramatically changed since 1996, we suspect it will be a short discussion.

Let’s talk first about what we mean, exactly, by nuclear waste. In this case, we are talking about the used, yet still extremely radioactive, nuclear rods used to power commercial reactors. These fuels are in a solid form, but they contain most of their long-lived radioactive materials and are so hot that they must be handled remotely.

That’s why some of these spent fuels already at INL are kept in short-term storage in deep pools of water — the better to dissipate the heat. That’s also why, until Obama’s election, the federal government was proposing long-term waste burial far underground at Yucca Mountain. The idea, both in the short- and long-term, is to keep these dangerous wastes as far away as possible from people.

That has long been the federal government’s extremely limited “mission” for waste storage, and it’s hard to see that changing.

Yes, Idaho’s Republican Central Committee attempted to reframe the discussion this summer by approving a resolution describing these wastes as an “asset-based material” that could be used for research and the manufacture of new nuclear waste fuels. But saying it doesn’t make it so.

The fuels’ research value is limited. Much of the fuel comes from older reactors — not the next-generation reactor designs now under study at INL and elsewhere.

And fuel “manufacture” is a nicer term for the reactor fuel “reprocessing,” the recycling of usable nuclear materials from fuel rods. This is a costly undertaking. It creates a new, unstable form of liquid high-level nuclear waste. And it runs counter to decades of U.S. policy. Defining these fuels as raw material for “manufacture” is, at best, wishful thinking.

Let’s be coldly pragmatic. There was a time — such as 1996 — when the federal government might have been in a position to throw billions of dollars of sweeteners at a state willing to take on nuclear waste storage. That, too, is unlikely to happen.

So what, exactly, is in it for Idaho?

Not much.

It is indeed possible, as proponents argue, that these fuels could be shipped to Idaho safely. And that these fuels could be stored, indefinitely and without incident, above the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer.

But for years, under Republican and Democratic governors alike, Idaho has held that the rewards do not outweigh the risks. Nothing has changed in that equation.

“Our View” is the editorial position of the Idaho Statesman. It is an unsigned opinion expressing the consensus of the Statesman’s editorial board.