An interview with Abraham Van Luik, US DoE geoscientist working on the nuclear waste repository under construction in Yucca Mountain. [more inside]
posted by Dr Dracator on Jan 4, 2010 - 32 comments

The Problem of Nuclear Waste, for kids: Imagine what your house would be like if no one EVER took out the garbage. Not only would your home be dirty and stinky, but it would also be a very unhealthy place to live. See Yucca Mountain Johnny while you can, because it looks like he won't be around much longer.
posted by cerebus19 on Jun 25, 2007 - 41 comments

The site of the world's first nuclear reactor? Gabon. About 1.7 billion years ago several deposits of uranium in Oklo, Gabon spontaneously began to undergo nuclear chain reactions fed by small drips of water. These natural breeder reactors ran for almost a million years, producing both intense heat and plutonium byproducts. Aside from the strangeness of naturally occurring reactors, Oklo provides the only existing case of how highly radioactive waste behaves over a period of tens of millions of years -- exactly the problem faced by the DOE's Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.
posted by blahblahblah on Feb 16, 2005 - 19 comments

A Blivet. More nuclear waste than the planned repository at Yucca Mountain can hold will pile up at reactor sites as the government continues to approve license extensions for power plants, an environmental research organization claimed in a study to be released today. If a repository is built by 2010 in the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, its 77,000-ton capacity will be filled by existing spent fuel awaiting shipment. That's not counting another 9,900 tons that will have accumulated in the meantime from license extensions, according to the study by the Environmental Working Group.
posted by kablam on Oct 23, 2004 - 10 comments

Nevada's Governor Kenny Guinn and Idaho's own Senator Larry Craig duke it out over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain. Of course the plan has no shortage of detractors like "Yucca Mountain Facts", and the Las Vegas Sun has done a pile of reporting on it: their "dossier", and "science vs. politics" (first in a five-part series, all of which is now online). The state should have a copy of the Evironmental Impact Statement somewhere, too. It's fun for the whole family! Guinn and Craig's stories are part of the High Country News' syndicated Writers on the Range series.
posted by dcehr on Feb 8, 2002 - 3 comments