ABSTRACT
The United States is facing one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges in its history: devising a system for safely storing high-level nuclear waste (HLNW) that will endure for 100 centuries in the face of all uncertainties, mishaps, and surprises the future will undoubtedly bring. The combination of technical difficulties, scientific uncertainties, escalating costs, repeated management failures, state opposition, and public distrust has so compromised the federal government's HLNW management program that it forces one to consider whether the approach should be abandoned altogether. From the beginning the United States HLNW management program has had a fractious and troubled history. The negative images associated with nuclear wastes come from the association with nuclear weapons, from events like the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979, and from revelations about radiation releases and leaking nuclear wastes at Department of Energy's nuclear weapons facilities.
