Scientists Fear Atomic Blast From Underground Dump

Some scientists fear a planned underground dump for the nation’s high-level atomic waste might erupt in an explosion, scattering radioactivity into the wind and water, The New York Times reported today.

Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have been debating the issue but have not been able to come up with a definitive answer, the newspaper said.

The federal government has spent eight years and $1.7 billion developing the plan to build the waste repository deep below Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The government wants to open the repository in 2010 as a permanent solution to the problem of disposing waste from nuclear power plants and from the production of nuclear warheads.

Last year, Dr. Charles D. Bowman and Dr. Francesco Venneri, both physicists at Los Alamos, raised the possibility that buried waste might detonate in a nuclear explosion.

In response, lab managers formed three teams with a total of 30 scientists to investigate the idea and disprove it, if possible.

The teams uncovered many problems with the thesis but were unable to lay it to rest, officials said. So, the lab is making the dispute public in the scientific community.

“If we knew how to put the stake through the heart, we’d do it,” said Dr. John C. Browne, head of energy research at the lab.

Bowman said the internal debate had changed some elements of the thesis but had also honed and strengthened it.

“We think there’s a generic problem with putting fissile materials underground,” he said.