Yucca Mtn Nuclear waste repository report on MSNBC

[JohnWxy]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3072031/

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Never before has man tried to dig a tomb shielding us from something so deadly for so long — at least 10,000 years. What the $58 billion project would bury is 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants across the United States.

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In a report issued just before Bush’s recommendation, the Nuclear Waste Review Board said its confidence level was “weak to moderate” due to the “many assumptions” that went into the project.

By law, Yucca scientists don’t have to be as rigorous in their projections of the nuclear waste’s fate beyond 10,000 years. But the board said those projections could be critically important in analyzing whether water might rust the waste containers over tens of thousands of years, allowing radioactivity to seep into the water table below.

Some outside observers concur. “No solid experiments or theory confirm the predictions that casks can survive without corrosive penetration for 10,000 years, let alone several hundred thousand years, when the most severe groundwater contamination is expected” says Thomas Pigford, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley.