Bracing for Yucca Mountain's Nuclear Forever
Deep Time, Short

In an interview, Steven Frishman, a geologist with Nevada's Nuclear Waste Task Force, talks about "downwinders," people who suffered deadly, long- term effects from the weapons testing, and how the federal government "knew it was dangerous and they weren't telling people." Now, he says, that same government, along with the nuclear industry, is "spinning the site," using "extraordinary levels of optimism and trying to convince people that it's safe because they have a political need to do it, not because it's actually a safe thing to be doing."

The problem? The waste is so lethal that by law it must be completely isolated for a minimum of 10,000 years. But many scientists (including a panel from the National Academy) dismiss that time span as a bureaucratic convenience. Others point out that much of the waste (mostly spent fuel rods from commercial and military reactors) will contain uranium, plutonium, and myriad other "iums" that will be dangerous for upward of a million years. Nevada's concern is that the site is not sound enough geologically to keep the waste from eventually getting into the groundwater, food chain, and air. DOE's own best case shows no violation of current radiation dose standards for roughly 100,000 years, but, as Governor Guinn's recent letter to Congress points out, DOE's computer models "have an uncertainty factor of 10,000."
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