Yucca Unfit Site

This op/ed appeared in the Tri-City Herald on March 23, 2010:

"While those of us in Nevada certainly sympathize with people in the Tri-Cities and in other areas (like South Carolina) over concerns about radioactive waste continuing to be stored at federal facilities in your neighborhoods, your March 14 editorial, "Joining forces against Yucca Mountain decision," is just plain wrong in asserting that there is no technical justification for U.S. Department of Energy's decision to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository project.

Yucca Mountain is a terrible site for a high-level nuclear waste disposal facility. The technical and scientific problems are legion, ranging from a highly corrosive subsurface environment, rapid groundwater flows through the subsurface, a highly fractured and seivelike host rock, evidence of geologic recent volacnic activity, its location in a major eqrthquake area, and many other problems. Yucca was selected in 1987 for purely politial reasons in spite of know technical deficiencies.

Moving radioactive waste from less-than-ideal storage locations in other states to a pattently unsafe repository at Yucca Mountain does not solve the problem. It compounds it. The fact that DOE has now (although 20 years late) acknowledged that the Yucca site is unfit and is moving, through the creation of the Blue Ribbon Commission, to find real solutions is something that should be encouraged and supported."

Joseph C. Strolin, Planning Adviser, Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, Office of the Governor