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Like 83% of the state of Nevada, the landto your right as you head up from LasVegas towards Reno is owned by the fed-eral government. A military airstrip for

unmanned aerial vehicles and a nuclear-weapons test range stretch into the distance;enormous concrete tubes that once held MXmissiles lie baking in the sun. The only signs ofcivilian life are a state prison, a brothel and a fewsmall clusters of air-conditioned trailer homes.

It is here in Nye County — where 38,000 soulsoccupy 47,000 square kilometres — that the USDepartment of Energy would like to bury morethan 70,000 tonnes of highly reactive nuclearwaste. The federal government says that YuccaMountain, a low peak on the western edge of itsnuclear test site, some 100 kilometres northwestof Las Vegas, is one of the safest places in Amer-ica for spent fuel to make its several-hundred-thousand-year journey to harmlessness.

Local residents want jobs, so they are notwholly opposed to the repository. But other citizenry of Nevada, many of whom rememberthe consequences of above-ground nuclear-weapons testing in the 1950s and 60s, are deeplysceptical. And so are their elected representa-tives. “The state of Nevada is committed to stop-ping this thing by any legal means possible,” saysSteve Frishman, a geologist and the technical

policy coordinator for the state government’sAgency for Nuclear Projects.

Virtually every democratic nation that hasembarked on a programme for the disposal of‘high-level’ nuclear waste has run into similartrouble, and few have found a way forward. Bit-ter fights with concerned citizens have derailedplans in Germany, Canada and the UnitedKingdom. “All of the world’s programmes nowrecognize that the non-technical problems arebigger than the technical ones,” says CharlesMcCombie, a nuclear-waste consultant who hasworked extensively on the Swiss, Canadian andJapanese disposal programmes.

Nations around the world with stocks ofwaste — including those anticipating rapidgrowth in such stocks (see ‘Booming nations gonuclear’, overleaf) — are realizing that to dis-pose of their nuclear waste, they need to buildtrust with local communities, and that it is onthese efforts that much of the future of nuclearpower depends. “If we don’t solve the waste

problem, we’re going to have major trouble con-tinuing the revitalization of nuclear power,” saysTom Isaacs, director for policy, planning andspecial studies at Lawrence Livermore NationalLaboratory in California.

A lasting legacyThe decay of the isotope uranium-235 innuclear fuel rods creates atomic nuclei with awide range of radioactivities and chemicalproperties. Some, such as neptunium-237, arepresent only in small quantities but can remainradioactive for millions of years. Others, includ-ing caesium-137 and strontium-90, make thewaste a health hazard for decades or centuries,and raise its temperature to above 500 �C. Themost problematic is plutonium-239, generatedfrom uranium-238, which when purified can befashioned into a nuclear weapon.

‘Reprocessing’, in which plutonium-239 andunused uranium-235 are reused as fuels or forweapons, reduces the amount of high-levelwaste produced. But as yet, it has never provedan economic way of making nuclear fuel. Andeven if reprocessing were to improve dramati-cally, or if the use of reactors or beams of parti-cles to transmute some of the isotopes into lessnoxious ones were to prove practical, generatingenergy from nuclear fission would still produce

The global future of nuclear power may rest in large part on local politics, reports Geoff Brumfiel.

FORWARD PLANNING

“All the world recognizes that the non-technical problems arebigger than the technical ones.”

— Charles McCombie

Experiments in a tunnel at the YuccaMountain nuclear-test site in Nevada aim to establish whether nuclear wastecould safely be dumped here.

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some waste posing a hazard for millennia. Andthat waste will need to be put somewhere.

Since the late 1950s, the scientific commu-nity has more-or-less agreed that the best wayto deal with this waste is to put it deep under-ground, says Malcolm Gray, a nuclear engi-neer with the waste-technology section of the International Atomic Energy Agency inVienna, Austria. Providing safety and securityfor surface facilities, such as the spent-fuelponds used at nuclear power plants, is costly,especially in the long term. Properly chosenand engineered sites can remain stable for mil-lennia and would not require the modificationof international treaties on dumping. “Geo-logical disposal is the only practical solution,”Gray says. Sites for such disposal are under

consideration around the world (see graphic). Yucca Mountain should serve as a caution-

ary tale, for such efforts, on two grounds. Oneis that despite years of research it is still notclear how well this particular site would meetthe stringent regulations called for by theNational Academies of Science (NAS). TheNAS recommends a regulatory period of sev-eral hundred thousand years, which couldmean keeping the waste safe all the waythrough the next two ice ages. The other is thatthe local people have never been more unitedin their rejection of the plans.

Yucca Mountain has been studied as a pos-sible site for nuclear-waste disposal since 1978.A bevy of experiments in an eight-kilometretunnel built in the side of the mountain have

looked at how water, heat and stray radioactivematerial might move through the rock. Thedata are used to estimate exposure rates forhumans who might stumble across the sitecenturies or millennia into the future.

In recent years, some of those experimentshave shown that waste could migrate to thewater table more quickly than expected. Andstudies of young volcanoes around the moun-tain have raised concerns about a breach occur-ring at the site (see Nature 412, 850–852; 2001).A big problem is that no models can be expectedto precisely predict exposure over such vast timeperiods. As Michael Voegele, a geological engi-neer with more than 25 years of experience atthe site, puts it: “It’s impossible to know exactlyhow water is going to move through the moun-

INDIA 15 TBD

Site investigations under way in the southern state of Karnataka.

CHINA 9 TBD

Experiments under way in Gansu province, with target opening date of 2050.

FINLAND 4 6,000 tonnes

Experiments under way in Eurajoki, with target opening date of 2020.

SWEDEN 10 9,000 tonnes

Two sites under investigation at Oskarshamn and Östhammar; final decision expected in 2008.

USA 104 70,000 tonnes

Experiments under way at Yucca Mountain, but local opposition makes final decision date unclear.

UK 23

Government is reconsidering geologic disposal; committee report is due out this spring.

FRANCE 59 6,000 m3*

Experiments in the Haute-Marne region will continue through 2006.

JAPAN 56 5,900 m3*

Government is in open-ended discussions with municipalities.

SOME PROPOSED REPOSITORIES FOR NUCLEAR WASTE

TBD

Reactors operating or under construction

Proposed repository size (approximate)

*Reprocessed waste measured by volume

India and China have very littlehigh-level nuclear waste today,but both countries areanticipating substantial nucleargrowth spurts to feed theirvoracious energy needs.

In China, where the number of reactors is expected to gofrom 9 to 40 within 15 years,geologists are characterizingeight repository sites in remoteGansu province near theMongolian border. Early work is now well under way, but it will be a while before a site is

constructed, according to JuWang of the Beijing ResearchInstitute of Uranium Geology.Initial surveys will be completedin 2015, a site will be selected by2030, and construction on afinal repository could begin by 2050.

Meanwhile, Indian nuclearengineers are planning amassive nuclear complex that will include spent-fuelreprocessing and so-calledbreeder reactors. These usenatural thorium deposits and

reprocessed nuclear fuel tocreate more uranium fuel. Suchbreeder reactor systems aretechnically complex but coulddramatically cut down the wastestream coming from India’snuclear complex.

Nevertheless, the nation is stillplanning a repository, accordingto Srikumar Banerjee, director ofthe Bhabha Atomic ResearchCentre in Mumbai. Experimentshave been carried out in a deepmine in the southern state ofKarnataka, and further studies are

being carried out in an operatinguranium-ore mine, Banerjee says.

Although the technicalprogrammes are well in hand,both India and China have somework to do to resolve the societalissues surrounding a wastedump, notes Malcolm Gray, a nuclear engineer at theInternational Atomic EnergyAgency in Vienna. “The Indiansare looking carefully into thesocial problems,” he says. “But,for now, the Chinese think they’llstill be able to sidestep it.” G.B.

Booming nations go nuclear

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tain when Chicago’s under 5,000 feet of ice.”These uncertainties fuel the doubts of Las

Vegans, says Peggy Maze Johnson, executivedirector of Citizen Alert, an environmentalgroup that is trying to block the project. Localpeople think Yucca Mountain was pickedbecause Nevada is thinly populated and haslittle political representation in Washington. “Iam not an expert,” Johnson says. “All I know isthat when something is based on politics, itdoesn’t make it sound science.”

Looking to the leadersRepositories cannot be built without addressingthis blend of political and scientific concerns,says Tero Varjoranta, director of nuclear wasteand materials regulation at Säteilyturvakeskus(STUK), a nuclear research centre and regula-tory authority in Helsinki, Finland. Varjorantasays it is critical that government agencies be,and be seen to be, impartial and authoritative.“We’re not selling the repository,” Varjorantasays of his own office. “We try to convince people that if it is built, it will be safe.”

In neighbouring Sweden, such impartialityhas been vital because of the strength of localmunicipalities, says Saida Engström, a memberof the board of directors at Svensk Kärnbränsle-hantering AB (SKB). Based in Stockholm, SKBis a company formed by the government that is charged with developing Sweden’s wasterepository. When Engström was in charge ofassessing the environmental impact of a repos-itory in the village of Tierp, 67% of the popula-tion supported her work, she says. But the city

council vetoed the project by one vote. “I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t bothered by

it — I was,” she says. “But for the credibility of the project it is vital that you involve localpeople in the process.” Ultimately, the veto atTierp showed that SKB was serious aboutrespecting local wishes and strengthened theprogramme’s reputation in other parts of thecountry, she argues. The company is continu-ing investigations at Oskarshamn andÖsthammar, where public support for the project continues to be strong.

Attempts to gain public trust have put the twoScandinavian nations far ahead in their effortsto build a repository, and other countries arenow looking to them for inspiration. In theUnited Kingdom, a government committee wasestablished in 2003, to tackle radioactive-wastemanagement. The committee, which includes

environmentalists and social scientists as well as physicists and engineers, will determinewhether a deeply buried repository is the bestway to dispose of waste. Lessons have beenlearnt after plans to build a repository at Sell-afield were thrown out by a public inquiry in1997. “That was the end of an old traditionwhere scientists, industry and government gottogether behind closed doors, thought up theright option, thought up the right site and then

announced it,” says Gordon MacKerron, aneconomist from the University of Sussex whochairs the committee.

Yet others worry that the pendulum hasswung too far in the direction of public opinion.“There’s a view out there, which basically saysthat science is not reliable anymore,” says DavidBall, a professor of risk management at Middle-sex University in London. Ball resigned lastspring from Britain’s committee on radioactive-waste management, in protest of what he saw asan over-reliance on public opinion. “They didn’tsee science as holding any objective truth andreplaced it with the good old common sense ofthe man on the Clapham omnibus,” he says.

Winning trustKeith Baverstock, a radiation health expert atthe University of Kuopio in Finland (see page993), adds that the Finnish and Swedish suc-cess is not due to national public acceptance.“The Finns have never had more than about40% of the general population agree that thisform of disposal was the correct way to do it,”he says. The key, he says, is to find a local com-munity willing to accept the project.

The views of local communities will not bedetermined only by local issues, such as jobs orworries about contamination. “Many groupsbegan opposing Yucca Mountain because theydidn’t want new nuclear power and they didn’twant it seen as the solution that allows for theconstruction of new nuclear plants,” says JudyTreichel, executive director of the NevadaNuclear Waste Task Force, which opposes theYucca Mountain project. And in Sweden, theremight be more local resistance to the country’swaste-repository project if the governmentwasn’t already committed to phasing outnuclear power across the country. At least, that’sthe view of Johan Swahn, director of theSwedish Office for Nuclear Waste Review — anenvironmental group that uses governmentfunding to monitor the repository project.“People are more willing to participate in theprocess with the understanding that nuclearwaste is a finite problem,” he says.

Regardless of what scientists and engineersbelieve is technically possible, they must beprepared to address these sorts of cultural con-cerns, says nuclear-waste consultant McCom-bie. More broadly, governments eager to see anuclear repository built must work harder towin their citizens’ respect. That’s no mean featand can only be achieved through time andtransparency, McCombie says: “You can’t justbuild it like you would a filling station; it has tobe a long process with buy-in and the potentialfor reversal at each stage.” ■

Geoff Brumfiel is Nature’s Washingtonphysical sciences correspondent.

Keep out: storing radioactive waste in surface facilities such as spent-fuel ponds is expensive and risky.

“The State of Nevada is committedto stopping this thing by any legal

means possible.” — Steve Frishman

SKB

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