Blow-up
over nuclear
dump
Nevadans have tried for
years to convince the rest of the country that Yucca Mountain, 80
miles northwest of Las Vegas, is a poor choice for the nation’s
only permanent nuclear-waste dump. Now they have some powerful
allies. Federal scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory
recently disclosed an internal debate about whether the planned
underground dump might someday explode. The blast would be equal to
several tons of TNT, and fallout from such an explosion would make
residents of nearby communities akin to the downwinders of nuclear
testing, says Steve Frischman of Nevada’s watchdog Agency for
Nuclear Projects. Meanwhile, scientists working for the Department
of Energy are scrambling to find a flaw in the theory. “If we knew
how to put a stake through (the explosion theory’s) heart, we’d do
it,” Dr. John C. Browne, head of energy research at Los Alamos,
told The New York Times. Opponents to the facility, scheduled to
open in 2010, have long cited the area’s frequent earthquakes as
one potential danger, and scientists now say that water percolating
through the mountain could speed up a nuclear reaction. More than
25,000 tons of plutonium waste is now stored aboveground at nuclear
power plants across the country, and a recent court decision just
cleared the way for indefinite on-site storage.
* Elizabeth Manning
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Blow-up over nuclear dump.
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