Sam Gibbons: “the proponents of storing nuclear waste in Nevada suffered a huge setback last week when scientists from the California…”

“the proponents of storing nuclear waste in Nevada suffered a huge setback last week when scientists from the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University reported that the strain in the Earth's crust near Yucca Mountain makes it at least 10 times more prone to earthquakes and lava flows than government scientists previously estimated. The study commissioned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded that the ground around Yucca Mountain could stretch more than 3 feet over the next 1,000 years. While this may not sound like a great deal of movement, this distance is a distance that would easily crush any canister of nuclear waste buried there, exposing a wide area including the water table of the Southwest to deadly radioactivity and pollution. When the original criteria for a long term nuclear storage site was created, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that any site that would be stable for 10,000 years would be appropriate for a high-level nuclear waste dump. However, now this latest data shows that the ground around Yucca Mountain will not be stable for even one-tenth of that time. It is a sure bet though, if we give the U.S. Department of Energy a scientific reason to doubt the wisdom of storing high-level waste at Yucca Mountain, the agency will simply ignore the findings. Nevada ranks third in the Nation for current seismic and earthquake activity.”