President Obama says Yucca Mountain is off the table as a storage center for waste from America's nuclear power plants. Congress seems to disagree and are still authorizing funding for the project. While political footballs are tossed about, people like Abraham Van Luik–a geoscientist with the U.S. Department of Energy–are quietly going about the business of making sure a facility like Yucca Mountain (if built) will actually work. No small feat, considering the fact that such a facility is supposed to be able to quarantine waste for a million years.BLDGBLOG interviewed Van Luik about what it's like to try to plan and engineer a project of this scale. It's long, but well worth the read.
BLDGBLOG: I'm interested in how you go about testing these sorts of designs. Do you actually build scale models, like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' hydrological models, or do you rely on lab tests and computer simulations, given the timescale and complexity?
Van Luik: What we do is safety assessments that project safety out to a million years. What I used to say to my troops, when I was a manager of this activity, was: "Safety assessment without any underlying science is like a confession in church without a sin: without the one, you have nothing to say in the other."
BLDGBLOG: One Million Years of Isolation
(Thanks, Chris Tackett!)
Image of a tunnel boring machine at Yucca Mountain courtesy the Department of Energy.
