Unfeasible

Aside from the deadly transportation hazards associated with getting nuclear waste across existing roads, water ways and rails to Nevada, and the unsuitability of Yucca Mountain in particular as a permanent storage site for high-level nuclear waste, the storage plan itself is inherently flawed.

Though the Department of Energy (DOE) spends nearly 2 million dollars a day funding its program, and digging its huge hole into the mountain (and into the pockets of taxpayers), it has yet to come up with a feasible permanent storage design plan. The plan is to store the waste in "casks" (containers) at Yucca Mountain. For these casks to be feasible storage vessels for high level nuclear waste material, they would have to remain intact and totally unbreached (uncracked) for thousands and thousands of years. No such container has yet been constructed; yet, each time opponents point out the geological unsuitability of the site (volcanic and earthquake activity, running groundwater), the yet-to-exist cask design is put forth by DOE as the answer. The federal government is fond of saying that the cask will be so fool-proof that no environmental concerns will matter.

While people everywhere vow to oppose the plan every step of the way, the DOE pushes desperately for the OK to build the dump when there isn't even a design plan in place.

Allan Benson, a Yucca Mountain Project spokesperson, says that the design plans shouldn't be hurried . . . meanwhile a deadline for a license application to construct the dump has been set for June 2008.  Legislation to build the site has been coming up over the past several years, though there is still no working design plan.

Does that make sense?? - 


To see what luck the DOE has had with its super-engineering of a storage cask design, press here

 
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