ABSTRACT
Yucca Mountain is the sole high-level nuclear waste repository for the United States if it passed its characterization analysis. The Yucca Mountain situation provides an excellent example of the contributions geologists can make to an issue of national policy that involves scientific information, but it also illustrates the difficulties regarding such an issue from a solely science-based viewpoint. The Yucca Mountain location was particularly desirable because it contained the fewest faults and the lowest water table—the depth underground where the rock or soil is saturated with water. Yucca Mountain is the only site in the United States under investigation as a possible mined geological repository for high-level nuclear waste. Such material includes the highly radioactive spent fuel rods from nuclear power reactors and highly radioactive waste materials from the production of nuclear weapons. The creation of a geological repository to contain the entire country's high-level nuclear waste, in retrospect, is an enormous undertaking.
