To the Editor:

I am not typically someone who is interested in getting into arguments through editorials and letters to the editor, but sometimes you read something that is very inaccurate or misleading, that you cannot help but respond to, right? Such was my feeling after reading the column by H. D. Thelorax entitled, “Nuclear Waste Lies in Yucca Mountain.”

To preface my remarks: I am not trying to make anyone feel warm and fuzzy about Yucca Mountain; I have questions about it myself, and some significant problems with the political decisions made in the 1980s. While I do not think that Yucca Mountain should be disregarded out-of-hand, neither do I believe it is the one true answer.

I note that Thelorax has gathered a “large amount of wind” in regards to this issue, so I find it a little odd that he did not reference any of his sources of information in his column. I was less confused when I found that every single piece of information that Thelorax gave, could be found on a two-page fact sheet entitled “Why Yucca Mountain Will Fail As A Nuclear Waste Repository” by the Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS), an ardent anti-nuclear group—http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/whyyuccawillleak.htm.

Many of the items noted in the article (and the NIRS fact sheet it seems to have originated from) are misleading at best and outright wrong at worst. The EPA was not “ordered to make an exception for Yucca Mountain.” Instead, they were directed to develop standards for a permanent repository, which had to be at least as protective as other standards for radioactive exposure, but this was designed specifically for this unique facility. The Shoshone Indians have laid claim to Yucca Mountain (another argument for another time), but it belongs to the US government, and is on land where nuclear weapons were tested in the 1950s and 1960s (not high on my list of vacation spots). “As seismically active as the California Bay area” is an unsubstantiated claim lifted directly from NIRS.

I was actually amused by the “serious carcinogen, Carbon-14,” which, as we may remember from our lessons on carbon dating, occurs in roughly one part per trillion in every one of our bodies, in every piece of food we eat, and in every tree and plant growing around us. Shocking.

Any good debate requires balance. I have known several anti-nuclear groups that have made interesting, thought-provoking arguments that have made me consider things that I had not thought about before. NIRS has never been one of them. If you want a view of the other side of the argument, I direct you towards websites from the Nuclear Energy Institute—http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=1&catid=14— and the American Nuclear Society —http://www.ans.org/pi/media/news/1010700763.html—on nuclear waste disposal. Surely you should take these with a grain of salt, since the former represents the nuclear generating utilities and the latter represents (in part) people working in the nuclear industry, but this is the same grain of salt that should be taken with information from anti-nuclear groups.

Meanwhile if you are looking for a preview of Thelorax’s article on nuclear transportation, which I expect will disregard the fifty years of very successful worldwide transportation of nuclear material, you might want to check out the NIRS fact sheet entitled, “Hot Cargo: Radioactive Waste Trans-portation”—http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/tranfs2.htm.

(Postscript: I apologize to Mr. or Ms. Thelorax for the use of the masculine pronouns in this letter. There is nothing to indicate the gender of the author, nor does it have any bearing on the response. There is simply a lack of polite gender-neutral in the English language.)

Peter Caracappa ’98 ’01

Nuclear Engineering