A Yucca Mountain travelogue

摘要

It was 6:20 when I walked out into another brilliant Nevada morning. I was headed for Yucca Mountain, a remote patch of desert behind the military gates of the Nevada Test Site and the proposed site for power plants to store used, but still radioactive, nuclear fuel. (Southern Company operates three nuclear plants and each pays into the Nuclear Waste Fund to ready Yucca Mountain for storage, as do other companies in the industry.) I set off for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management―a sobering destination at any hour. I navigated down six lanes of traffic in an SUV, through what arguably is the strangest stretch of architecture on the face of the earth: the Vegas strip. Almost all of Nevada's man-made landmarks are concentrated into a 5-mile "gawkway." When I located the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, I found a little office tucked between a community college and a local YMCA. It looked like the kind of place that once sold auto parts. Now it houses a small museum to explain the Yucca site and its history. Accompanying documentation could fill a library. The effort started in 1982 with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. By 1987, Congress revised the act to specifically investigate the merits of Yucca Mountain.