Nuke dump plan ‘is a bad design’

THE US nuclear waste dump proposed for Nevada is poorly designed and could leak highly radioactive waste, a scientist who recently resigned from a federal panel of experts on Yucca Mountain has claimed.

Paul Craig, a physicist and engineering professor at the University of California-Davis, said he quit the panel so he could speak more freely about the dump’s dangers.

Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles north-west of Las Vegas, is planned to begin receiving waste in 2010. Some 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste would be stored in metal canisters underground.