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.

“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. It is a bad design.”