Customer Reviews

Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation's High-Level Nuclear Waste

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I work in the field and yet, I found the revelations in book to be disturbing. It is professionally and objectively done. It is not an alarmist call to action, but rather a thoughtful description of what has been done, what is being done and what could be done about high-level nuclear waste.

This book is an anthology of articles related to research concerning the long-term stability of the Yucca Mountain repository. The articles discuss such things as earthquakes, volcanism, changes in water-table levels over time, diffusive versus fracture hydrology, the stability of radwaste-containing containers and ceramics, bacterially-mediated changes in plutonium chemistry, and transport of radionuclides in a colloidal rather than dissolved state.

Some of the authors are candid about the uncertainties. For instance, hydrological models cannot be tested, and just because they account for current phenomenon doesn't necessarily mean that they have successfully predicted future phenomenon. There is also the ever-present problem of taking observations conducted for a few years and extrapolating them to over a period of 10,000 years or more into the future. In fact, we know of examples where sophisticated models turned out to be wrong even within our very limited time-frame of experience. In addition, models which attempt to factor rare events (e. g. volcanoes) may give overly optimistic estimates of their recurrence. We do not know how important groundwater movement in fractures may be around Yucca Mountain. And what do the high strain rates measured in the area mean?

What if the safety conclusions are wrong? For a fictional account of a Yucca Mountain disaster, see Yucca Mountain Dirty Bomb.

This work provides factual basis for the discussion of suitability of the geological set up at the mountain. also, there is some, albeit limited discussion of the technical aspects of nuclar waste storage (glass packs ect.), but only in the context of the storage at the site. excellent book, full of well explained facts.