"Opponents of opening Yucca Mountain to nuclear waste deposits say that beyond the issues tied to public health there are also questions related to national security. Moving 77,000 tons of waste is a logistical nightmare that would involve 53,000 truck shipments or 10,000 rail shipments over 24 years."

It reminds me of another logistical nightmare: To feed a big electric plant, BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad) carries two trainloads of coal a day from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to Georgia. Each train consists of 133 cars carrying about 50 tons each; that's about 65 000 tons per train. Every day of the year. (Read John McPhee in 2 issues of The New Yorker for early October 2005.)

The Yucca Mountain repository will undoubtedly die, the death of a thousand cuts (law suits, senatorial and gubernatorial interventions, etc.), but nuclear energy will live and perhaps even grow, with on-site dry cask storage of spent fuel for a hundred years or so, until another generation arises who have not known Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, etc. (like the Israelites who spent 40 years in the desert until another generation should arise which had not known [slavery under] Pharaoh).

The new generation will recognize those stored fuel elements, not as waste, but as a valuable source of energy - the fission energy of U-238 to be released in fast neutron reactors (four of the six concepts of Generation IV are FNR's), perhaps fifty times as much energy as they have already yielded.

The fact is, of course, that this is a relatively simple if massive engineering project, which has been inflated by merchants of fear into a major issue. It is certainly insoluble if it is left in the hands of the employees of the Department of Energy whose jobs would vanish if it were solved.

Berol Robinson
President
Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy

You write (April 17) that killing Yucca Mountain will most seriously reduce the potential future success of Nuclear Energy in the U.S. In fact I don't believe that is so. Senator Reid argues that we can go to "dry storage." I would not take up that argument. Rather we must understand that the most significant problems with nuclear waste arise from the presence in the waste of plutonium and the actinides that result from uranium 238.

I ask--Why do we constantly produce plutonium in our power plants? Is it absolutely necessary that we include uranium 238? The answer is--not necessarily. As a matter of fact, we can burn pure U-235, or very close to pure, while, if we wish to extend the life of nuclear power we can put blankets of thorium around these U-235 cores so as to produce U-233 and eventually run on the Thorium U-233 breeding cycle.

If nothing else, we could at the very least extract the plutonium and actinides from the waste fuel and recycle them in reactors, just as is planned in Japan, and France, and many other countries. The U.S. response to that is the same as our response to the other alternatives presented above, namely "that's not the way we have it planned."

It is important for your readers to know that there are alternatives instead of "bullying" our way into Yucca Mountain.

Dr. Jerry L. Shapiro
Moraga, CA

I have concluded after 28 years in the electric utility business that nuclear power is the only environmentally safe source for the energy we will need to maintain and advance a technological society. The dream of "renewable" energy sources taking the place of hydrocarbon based power generation is just that - a dream. That being said, there are still many questions about the safety and ultimate viability of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository. Once the scientific and engineering issues are separated from the NIMBY effect, there will still remain the question of whether current nuclear power plant technology is "clean" enough.

It is my opinion that until the commitment is made to use the best technology that creates the least radioactive waste for all future nuclear energy development, we will continue to face both scientific and public resistance. Yucca Mountain or any other facility should not be the ultimate answer nor should it be allowed to let the U.S. government, utilities, or merchant generators off the hook for dealing with the true costs of power production. Just as the polluting effects of coal and oil based power production have begun to be dealt with at the generating source, so must any future nuclear industry be required to pay as they go.

The difference is that we are in a position to create the new nuclear power industry with those requirements as a part of the process, rather than as legislated after-thoughts. Along with technology that reduces waste by reusing nuclear fuels as much as feasible, nuclear power plants must be designed to also produce hydrogen as a fuel source for vehicles and fuel cells. Reducing dependency on foreign oil should be of immense help in selling nuclear power to the public.

Better technology is still the right answer for technological problems.

Jim Van Sickle

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