William Bryan: “I want to focus my colleagues' attention on a subject that has consumed a good bit of my energy now for more than a…”

“I want to focus my colleagues' attention on a subject that has consumed a good bit of my energy now for more than a decade. It is the subject of a high-level nuclear waste repository and an ill-conceived proposal by the nuclear power industry that Yucca Mountain in Nevada is the ideal place to do that. I want to further call to my colleagues' attention the front page article in the New York Times yesterday which, in my judgment, says it all. I have had it blown up here. ``Scientists Fear Atomic Explosion of Buried Waste, Debate by Researchers, Argument Strikes New Blow Against a Proposal for a Repository in Nevada.'' That does pretty well sum it up, because for the past 13 years, there has been an unremitting, relentless effort to locate a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, assuring us in Nevada that it is perfectly safe, nothing to worry about. This article reveals that, since last summer, Department of Energy scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the most distinguished laboratories in America, have been studying a premise advanced by one of their colleagues that nuclear waste stored in a geologic repository in volcanic tuff risks ``going critical.'' That is nuclear jargon--``going critical.'' To those of us who are laymen, it means an explosion, a detonation, in which radioactive material would be scattered for miles and miles.…”