WASHINGTON -- The United States should immediately start looking for an alternative to replace the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, which cost an estimated $15 billion but was never completed, a presidential commission said Thursday.

In its final report, the 15-member Blue Ribbon Commission recommended immediate efforts to develop at least one geologic disposal facility for long-term handling of nuclear waste. Any effort to site a disposal facility must have community support, it said.

The report also suggested building regional storage sites that would be open for up to 100 years while officials seek to complete a permanent burial site.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has received a 2012 Excellence in Technology Transfer award for technology being used commercially that improves research sample analysis.

The technology developed at the Department of Energy national lab in Richland provides a new way to manufacture a tiny glass tube, called an emitter, that's used in electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. The technology is being used by Michrom Bioresources of Auburn, Calif.

Traditionally, the tapered ends of emitters, which have openings the width of a horse hair, are made by heating a glass capillary and pulling until the end forms a fine tip. But the process can make the interior of the tip so narrow that particles in the emitter become stuck.

(AP) - Japan's deputy prime minister acknowledged Friday that the government failed to take minutes of 10 meetings last year on the response to the country's disasters and nuclear crisis and called for officials to compile reports on the meetings retroactively.

The missing minutes have become a hot political debate, with opposition lawmakers saying they are necessary to provide a transparent record of the government's discussion after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami touched off the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

Deputy Prime Minister Katsuya Okada confirmed Friday at a news conference that the minutes were not fully recorded at the time and called for them to be written up, retroactively, by the end of February. Three of the meetings during the chaotic period had no record at all, not even an agenda, including a government nuclear crisis meeting headed by the prime minister.