SCENES FROM SCIENCE
Not in my back yard
WITH the advent of privatising the power industry, much closer thought than before has had to be given to what on earth to do with nuclear waste short of bunging it off into space. We have our woes ahead of us. So, it appears, have our American cousins. Responsibility in the United States lies with the Department of Energy, which takes orders from Congress. High-level waste — spent fuel-rods from power- plants and by-products from bomb- making — is obviously the worst headache. Congress ordered the DoE to open an underground repository for this waste by 1998; then, having itself fixed on a single site, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, extended the date to 2003. Signal for all hell to break loose in Nevada; objections from all Nevadans, politicians included, as a result of which the state refused permits to DoE to drill essential exploratory shafts into Yucca Mountain. DoE has asked the Depart- ment of Justice to sue the state and force it to issue permits. (Nevadans threaten to take the fight to the Sup- reme Court.) If and when that is settled, DoE has to show that Yucca Mountain can contain its lethal contents for 10,000 years, as required by the Environmental Protection Agency: shafts have to be drilled or dynamited, but the water to lubricate the drills and the fractures made by the dynamite may adversely affect the repository's integrity. With these little matters settled, DoE is not out of the mire: Yucca Mountain is in a seismically unstable region in which a volcano has erupted less than 10,000 years ago. And if Yucca Mountain finally does prove unsuitable, Congress has no alternative!
So what about a temporary store- house till the permanent one is ready? Back in the 1980s DoE had thoughtfully proposed a site for this in Tennessee. Protests from State officials in Tennes- see so vociferous that Congress turned down the idea — and furthermore stipulated that sites for a temporary facility should not be considered until the site for a permanent repository had been approved. DoE has asked permis- sion to go ahead all the same, and if Congress were to change its mind (un- likely), a state would still have to be found which agreed to so much. With all this, and more, going on, the New York Times has printed an editorial 'Revive the Atom'.
William Cooper
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