Because the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a part of the federal bureaucracy, it can make even groundbreaking news seem mundane.

Take this understated sentence in its ruling Aug. 7 delaying the final issuance of any nuclear permits, for existing or new power plants:

“Waste confidence undergirds certain agency licensing decisions, in particular new reactor licensing and reactor licensing renewal.”

Translation: The country cannot continue to talk about building new nuclear plants without figuring out what it is going to do with the dangerous waste that literally is stacking up at sites all over the country.

That means that because Americans can have no confidence that the NRC has seriously dealt with the growing problem of nuclear waste, the NRC will stop making the problem worse by extending nuclear plant licenses. The moratorium will remain until there is some reasonable plan to dispose of waste that “will remain dangerous for time spans seemingly beyond human comprehension.”

Those are the words of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which ruled in June that the NRC’s decision to allow nuclear plants to continue to store waste at their facilities for an additional 30 years (beyond the 30 years that were envisioned originally) needed further study. The NRC’s decision to delay issuing any licensing permits is a response to that court ruling.

The court ruling, and the NRC’s response, resulted from lawsuits filed by numerous environmental groups. The decision is monumentally good news for Americans who simply want the nuclear industry to behave more responsibly before the federal government doubles down on its investment in an energy source that never has made financial sense.

For too long, the nuclear industry, with a wink and a nod from government, simply has stacked spent nuclear fuel rods in cooling ponds or concrete storage casks. A national repository for the waste was being built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but politics, specifically the presidential election in 2008, helped scuttle that reasonable proposal.

But the waste must go somewhere, and until we as a nation deal with it, any discussion of new nuclear energy is foolhardy.

The actions by the Court of Appeals and the NRC don’t guarantee that our nation’s politicians or nuclear providers will once and for all deal with the nuclear waste. But it puts that waste where it belongs, front and center in the debate over the future of nuclear power in this country.