After nearly 30 years of scientific, congressional, and public debate about what to do with the Nation's high-level radioactive waste, the Department of Energy was suddenly under the gun. A daunting schedule was now written into law under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) to get a geologic repository up and running in a few short years. If DOE failed in this mandate, they could find themselves besieged with lawsuits.

The aggressive schedule established by the NWPA meant that the nine sites already under consideration when the Act was passed, automatically formed the basis of site screening for the first repository. By 1984, these were narrowed to five sites – three in salt formations in Mississippi, Texas, and Utah; one in basalt at Hanford; and one in the volcanic tuff of Yucca Mountain at the Nevada Test Site. The process of selecting the first repository from among these candidates became known as the First Round.