Abstract

An incarnation of an old demon surfaced in a recent geological report on the Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain, Nev., site, the expected underground home to more than 40,000 tons of radioactive spent fuel generated by the nuclear power industry. The old devil is water. Its presence in a few mineral samples collected at the site is reigniting fears that large volumes of water may inundate the area sometime in the hundreds of centuries the waste is to remain isolated, buried in tuff some 300 meters below Earth's surface and 300 meters above the water table. The samples discussed in the report show evidence that fluids have upwelled in the past, driven by hydrothermal activity. The report, released Dec. 1, is authored by Yuri Dublyansky, a geologist at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a former contractor for the state of Nevada. The Institute for Energy & Environmental Research (IEER)—a nonprofit ...

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