The trouble with nuclear waste

It’s not easy building a home for spent radioactive material. The proposed site at Yucca Mountain has been underway for over 30 years.

(Fortune) — The drive to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository from the Energy Department’s office in Las Vegas takes about two hours. It’s a freaky ride, past fast-growing Pahrump, Nevada, now a bedroom community for Las Vegas; past Nellis Air Force base, where unmanned spy drones — Predators and Raptors — fly test flights; past the gunnery range and the old atom bomb test site.

Next I’m within spyglass range of Area 51 (you know, where the government stores aliens in giant freezers), then headed through Lathrop Wells, the last inhabited outpost on the way to Yucca, with two gas stations and a brothel; to the perimeter guard house, and we’re in.

Mike Voegele, former chief scientist at Yucca Mountain, now retired, points out landmarks on the barren, toasted landscape — remnants of the other uses this desolate patch of desert has endured in years past. The surplus missile silos left over from the Cold War, for instance, are unearthed now and lying on their sides and converted into offices.

And Little Skull Mountain, away on the northern horizon, is the site of what Voegele describes as “my personal favorite test done in the whole United States.” It was there that the Air Force once stood a tunnel boring machine on its end and buried it under 50 feet of broken rock, simulating conditions that would result if the Russians bombed us before we could bomb them.

Fortune