Nevada Waste Site Approved by Congress

As is apparent in “Senate OKs Nevada Nuclear Waste Site” (July 10), the Department of Energy’s plan to store nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain is a hazard not only to Nevada but to the rest of the U.S. Apparently, some of our representatives think it is fine to store nuclear waste in an area intersected by more than 30 earthquake faults, where water will flow down into an aquifer that provides drinking water for a neighboring community.

With hundreds of significant, unresolved technical issues declared outstanding by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, this plan would require transporting the dangerous waste through more than 100 cities. I cannot wait to see the first rail container containing many times the amount of long-lived radioactive material that was released at Hiroshima traveling through my backyard. Nevadans are fighting with lawsuits while the NRC considers the implications of this plan. Let us fight with them to make the nation safe for future generations.

Sarah Hill

Los Angeles

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I was curious whether any of the scientists or politicians have considered the feasibility of some technology that could convert the energy within nuclear waste into other forms of power. If I remember my college physics professors correctly, energy is not created but merely changed from one form to another. Could we not recycle the nuclear waste energy into something more useful instead of creating a huge, 10,000-year storage problem?

Mitchell G. Lindsay-Lewis

San Gabriel