Yucca Mountain's no place to store waste
The Oregonian’s editorial board needs a refresher course in the science behind President Obama’s decision to permanently close down the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain (“Don’t seal off Yucca Mountain,” March 3).
The site is crisscrossed with 33 fault lines. The mountain moves so often the Western Shoshone Indian Nation nicknamed it “Serpent Swimming West.” Travertine, a mineral deposited by groundwater percolation, appears on the surface along six active fault lines.
In a column which appeared in The Oregonian on Feb. 28, 2002, Molly Ivins needed only nine words to sum up the threat: “Yucca Mountain is in an earthquake zone and leaks.”
Nothing has changed since Nov. 26, 1990, when The Oregonian’s Page 2 headline blazoned, "Warning at Yucca Mountain: Dump may mean disaster." In the article, New York Times reporter William J. Broad quoted University of Colorado geophysicist Charles B. Archambeau: "If you want to envision the end of the world, that's it."
Your editorial begins, “It makes little sense, except as a matter of politics, to rule out now and forever the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository....”
It makes all the sense in the world, not as a matter of politics, but as a matter of survival.
Published in The Oregonian, March 6, 2010
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