Cover Image: March 2003 Scientific American Magazine See Inside

Man against a Mountain [Preview]

Yucca Mountain is set to become the nation's prime nuclear waste site, but geologist Rodney C. Ewing thinks that federal enthusiasm for it has outstripped the science















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RODNEY C. EWING: SAYING NO TO YUCCA " data-pin-do="buttonBookmark">

RODNEY C. EWING: SAYING NO TO YUCCA

  • A multidepartmental professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, spanning nuclear engineering, geology and materials science.
  • With geologist Allison Macfarlane of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ewing is finishing a book, due out early next year, on Yucca Mountain's unresolved technical issues.
  • "The game is not rigged like a crooked card game, but the lack of choice at every step drives us inexorably to Yucca Mountain."
Image: JEFFREY M. SAUGER

Some 75,000 feet of core samples and 18,000 geologic and water specimens have been retrieved from a desolate ridge in the Nevada Desert called Yucca Mountain. Products of a 20-year investigation by the Department of Energy, the recovered materials and their subsequent analyses have made the volcanic protrusion among the most studied features on earth. And such statistics make DOE officials confident that Yucca Mountain would be a suitable disposal site for the nation's high-level nuclear waste, able to hold 70,000 metric tons of radioactive poison safely for 10,000 years.

Rodney C. Ewing begs to differ. Citing the amount of research is "not the way you measure good science, any more than you judge the merits of a book by the number of words," says the 56-year-old geologist, who holds an interdisciplinary professorship at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Ewing sits on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Board on Radioactive Waste Management and has served on the Yucca Mountain peer-review panel. One of Yucca's most knowledgeable critics, he believes that the mass of information collected, which can be measured in tons, masks even greater unknowns.


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