Yucca Mountain Advisory Board Member Resigns

A member of an independent board of experts that provides oversight for the U.S. Energy Department’s plan to construct a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada resigned last month in order to speak out more against the project, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Jan. 15).

Paul Craig, a physicist and engineering professor at the University of California-Davis, resigned from the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. Yesterday, Davis said the Energy Department’s plans for the repository are flawed and could lead to the leakage of the radioactive waste to be stored there (see GSN, Nov. 3, 2003).

“The science is very clear,” Craig said. “If we get high-temperature liquids, the metal would corrode and that would eventually lead to leakage of nuclear waste,” he said.

Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson, however, defended the department’s plan for the Yucca Mountain repository, scheduled to begin operation in 2010. “We stand by our work,” he said yesterday (Scott Sonner, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Feb. 19).

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