AURA

This is one place we’re not going. You can do what you want, but I’m not interested. A salt mine under Yucca Mountain is the proposed national nuclear waste repository. Nuclear waste has been stored at nuclear power plants all over the U.S. ever since nuclear power plants started. And of course nobody wants nuclear waste in their neighborhood. Stow it under Yucca Mountain is the answer.

But will it prevent a spill? Three small earthquakes about 20 miles from the mountain in the early 90’s say – Maybe not. Listen to this from the

World Resources Institute, The 1994 Information Please Environmental Almanac, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1994), p. 102:

"The selected permanent site deep beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada is supposed to be ready by 2010. But few expect the U.S. Department of Energy to meet the deadline or to prepare a temporary storage facility by 1998. Many Nevada state officials and residents are against the plan to permanently place up to 70,000 tons of radioactive waste there.

"The potential for finding sufficient storage space for the sheer mass of waste is also in question. Even if the $30 billion, [$30 billion did you hear that? – Even if the $30 billion] Yucca Mountain facility could be built on time, projections show that the nuclear industry will have produced more than the facility’s 70,000-ton capacity before 2020, a few years after the Yucca Mountain repository’s projected opening. Further, a study by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicates it could take decades to move that material to the permanent site. Today in U.S. nuclear power plants more than 20,000 fuel rods are being stored on what the industry calls a temporary basis.

Some plants have had to double their storage space, and then double it again. Two Virginia plants have begun placing the radioactive fuel rods in more permanent steel casings that are set on concrete.

There are a few links you can click on to see what this hell-hole is like. And reading the newspaper I can bring you up to date: News leaked out in January 2019 that plutonium had been shipped here a bit before November 2018 from South Carolina. So: You can go have a look. But I’m staying put.

A State researcher shot this photo from the top of Yucca Mountain looking west toward California. In the foreground are two volcanic cinder cones.

● Eureka ! Yucca Mountain

● A tour you probably won't be taking

● More pictures

● All aboard ! Putting Yucca Mtn back together again