Trips Places Foods Stories Newsletters

Take your next trip with Atlas Obscura!

Our small-group adventures are inspired by our Atlas of the world's most fascinating places, the stories behind them, and the people who bring them to life.

Visit Adventures
Trips Highlight
Borneo orangutan
Malaysia • 12 days, 11 nights
Wild Borneo: Secrets of an Ancient Rainforest
from
Pastel de nata
Portugal • 8 days, 7 nights
Portugal: A Culinary Adventure from Porto to Lisbon
from
View all trips
Top Destinations
Latest Places
Most Popular Places Random Place Lists Itineraries
Add a Place
Download the App
Top Destinations
View All Destinations »

Countries

  • Australia
  • Canada
  • China
  • France
  • Germany
  • India
  • Italy
  • Japan

Cities

  • Amsterdam
  • Barcelona
  • Beijing
  • Berlin
  • Boston
  • Budapest
  • Chicago
  • London
  • Los Angeles
  • Mexico City
  • Montreal
  • Moscow
  • New Orleans
  • New York City
  • Paris
  • Philadelphia
  • Rome
  • San Francisco
  • Seattle
  • Stockholm
  • Tokyo
  • Toronto
  • Vienna
  • Washington, D.C.
Latest Places
View All Places »
The wall commemorating 11,908 Jewish victims of the Shoah from Frankfurt.
Börneplatz Memorial
Entrance to the munitions area of the lower part of the bunker
Simserhof
Carlos Calderón Yruegas calls the villa his personal playground.
Villa Tabaiba
Apples and pears, Spitalfields Market.
Brick Lane Roundels
Latest Places to Eat & Drink
View All Places to Eat »
The sign declares this the number-one gumbo shop in town.
Gumbo Hut Shioya
The pavlova comes crowned with jewel-like fruit.
Central Park Boathouse
The Village Tavern of Long Grove - exterior.
The Village Tavern
Hunter House Hamburgers
L’Escamoteur
Recent Stories
All Stories Video Podcast
Most Recent Stories
View All Stories »
Longwood House, where Napoleon Bonaparte spent his final years.
The Longwood House: Napoleon Bonaparte’s Beautiful Prison
about 12 hours ago
 Fenway Park at night
How Was Your First Trip With Your Significant Other?
2 days ago
Ivan the Terra Bus
The Bus, the Myth, the Legend: Ivan the Terra Bus
3 days ago
Pigeons were included in a series of 1891 illustrations entitled “Household Pets.”
What Makes a Pest a Pest?
4 days ago

No search results found for
“”

Make sure words are spelled correctly.

Try searching for a travel destination.

Places near me Random place

Popular Destinations

  • Paris
  • London
  • New York
  • Berlin
  • Rome
  • Los Angeles
Trips Places Foods Stories Newsletters
Sign In Join
Places near me Random place
All the United States Nevada Nye Yucca Mountain Repository

Yucca Mountain Repository

Potential high level nuclear waste storage site for the next 10,000 years and beyond.

Nye, Nevada

Added By
LongNow
Email
Been Here
Want to go
Added to list
The repository seal.   US Department of Energy/Public Domain
The repository seal.   US Department of Energy/Public Domain
  http://www.rw.doe.gov/info_library/newsroo...
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/4069...
  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d...
  http://www.rw.doe.gov/info_library/newsroo...
  http://www.rw.doe.gov/info_library/newsroo...
  http://www.rw.doe.gov/info_library/newsroo...
  http://www.rw.doe.gov/info_library/newsroo...
The Tunnel Boring machine at night   http://www.rw.doe.gov/info_library/newsroo...
  http://www.rw.doe.gov/info_library/newsroo...
Been Here
Want to go
Added to list

About

Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada is more a ridge than a mountain. Created as deep volcanic tuff deposited by an extinct supervolcano (or caldera), it gradually rises from a height of 4,000 feet to 6,000 feet along its 6-mile length.

To enter the area planned for use as the Yucca Mountain Repository, one rides a rudimentary, and topless, shuttle train into one of the biggest holes in the world, a five-mile-long, U-shaped tunnel bored straight into the face of Yucca Mountain. This is one of two tunnels that the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) bored into the ridge; the second was a straight tunnel (excavated for experimental purposes) at the end of which its boring machine is still sitting, probably never to be used again.

In 1997 a 25-foot-diameter borer machine emerged from the face of the mountain to open the other end of the tunnel, 3 miles south of the north portal. For most of its length, the tunnel is about 1,000 feet beneath the ridge's summit and, even more importantly, 1,000 feet above the local geologic water table. That’s important because, of course, the facility to be constructed around this tunnel inside Yucca Mountain is where the United States Government has planned to store much of the nation’s high level nuclear waste (HLW) for the next 10,000 years and beyond.

Yucca Mountain was chosen to store the HLW instead of two other alternatives -- in Texas and Washington -- initially proposed to be capable of the task of storing the material for 10,000 years. However, Yucca Mountain was chosen, in part, arbitrarily after Congress balked at the spending required to fully test the other two sites, much to the frustration of Nevada citizens who opposed the project.

The more than 5 miles of tunnels, cross drifts, and alcoves that have been drilled so far into Yucca Mountain make up what is called the Exploratory Studies Facility (ESF). It is the physical setting for a research program, costing $8 billion so far, intended to demonstrate the absolute safety of the Yucca Mountain site as a repository for HLW for 10,000 years. If the Yucca Mountain site is approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to actually receive HLW, YMP must bore another 60 miles of side tunnels (branching off the main tunnel). It is the side tunnels where HLW will be stored.

Deep in the ESF, rows of space heaters were used in tests to determine the effects on the tunnel environment of the enormous heat (hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit) that the HLW will produce during its first several hundred years of emplacement. The HLW (pellets of spent nuclear fuel held in specially configured metal racks) is to be sealed in wheeled canisters made of a corrosion-resistant metal called Alloy 22. The canisters will be placed end-to-end in the side tunnels; the number of canisters in a given side tunnel determines the maximum heat radiated into that tunnel.

The design of the Yucca Mountain Repository is capable of holding up to 125,000 metric tonnes (MT) of HLW. Currently, America's 104 nuclear plants and the nuclear weapons program have produced over 40,000 MT of HLW and will have produced an estimated 63,000 MT of HLW by 2014. In 2035 the volume of HLW will have reached twice that. Most of that waste is currently stored in 33 different states at NRC-approved storage facilities, typically in pools or above-ground concrete casks adjacent to the nation's 72 nuclear power plants. These facilities were designed as temporary (that is, decades-long) storage sites, and the risk of dangerous failures at those facilities is increasing over time.

Today the future of the Yucca Mountain Repository is still very much in doubt. On February 14, 2002, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham recommended the approval of the Yucca Mountain Repository to President George W. Bush, who acted the next day to notify Congress of his intention to move ahead with the project. However, in 2009 President Barack Obama reversed this decision and, along with his Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, said that "the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste." As a consequence, YMP has no official opening date, though it continues to move forward. With a 2008 project budget of $390 million, the lowest since 2002, DOE continues to keep the project alive.

In 2006 a committee of 96 doctoral degree-granting institutions and 11 associate member universities was formed to review YMP for safety and viability. A previous review from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Work was favorable towards the site.

Whether the interior of Yucca Mountain is eventually used as a HLW repository or another, better option comes along, such as HLW reprocessing to produce additional nuclear fuel, the questions over storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel will continue to vex the United States Government and must be answered as early as the next few decades.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original text by Peter Schwartz at the Long Now Blog.

Related Tags

Nuclear Instruments Of Science Long Now Locations Subterranean Sites

Community Contributors

Added By

LongNow

Edited By

Molly McBride Jacobson, mbison

  • Molly McBride Jacobson
  • mbison

Published

December 9, 2009

Edit this listing

Make an Edit
Add Photos
Sources
  • http://blog.longnow.org/2002/03/03/yucca-mountains-future/
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository
  • http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/million-years-of-isolation-interview.html
Yucca Mountain Repository
Yucca Mountain
Nellis Military Operations Area
Nye, Nevada
United States
36.852778, -116.4266
Get Directions

Nearby Places

Carrara

Beatty, Nevada

miles away

Angel's Ladies Brothel

Beatty, Nevada

miles away

Tom Kelly's Bottle House

Beatty, Nevada

miles away

Explore the Destination Guide

Photo of Nye

Nye

Nevada

Places 2

Nearby Places

Carrara

Beatty, Nevada

miles away

Angel's Ladies Brothel

Beatty, Nevada

miles away

Tom Kelly's Bottle House

Beatty, Nevada

miles away

Explore the Destination Guide

Photo of Nye

Nye

Nevada

Places 2

Related Stories and Lists

39 Places That Will Warp Your Perspective of Time

List

By Molly McBride Jacobson

Five Landmarks of Atomic Nevada

atom bombs

Sponsored by Travel Nevada

Related Places

  • The shelter’s blast door

    White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia

    Congressional Fallout Shelter at the Greenbrier Resort

    America's post-nuclear-attack chambers of Congress.

  • Green Valley, Arizona

    Titan Missile Museum

    America's only nuclear missile silo open to the public.

  • Entering the Mormon Archives, Stewart Brand Center, photo by Alexander Rose.

    Sandy, Utah

    Mormon Genealogical Archives

    Step into the cool deep past and unknown future of who begat who.

  • 816 Underground Nuclear Plant.

    Fuling, China

    816 Underground Nuclear Plant

    This top secret Chinese military megaproject is the world’s largest human-made tunnel structure.

  • George Street entrance to the Guardian Telephone Exchange.

    Manchester, England

    Guardian Telephone Exchange Tunnels

    This nondescript building hides an entrance to an underground nuclear tunnel system.

  • Reactor Instituut Delft.

    Delft, Netherlands

    Reactor Institute Delft

    A nuclear reactor created for Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" campaign is now used for research at a Dutch university.

  • The lake in the winter.

    Lappajärvi, Finland

    Lake Lappajärvi

    Nuclear waste experts study this prehistoric crater lake to envision landscapes one million years in the future.

  • A door to the tunnels

    Xianning Shi, China

    Underground Project 131

    This Cold War–era underground city includes offices for Mao Zedong and Lin Biao.

Aerial image of Vietnam, displaying the picturesque rice terraces, characterized by their layered, verdant fields.
Atlas Obscura Membership

Become an Atlas Obscura Member


Join our community of curious explorers.

Become a Member

Get Our Email Newsletter

Follow Us

Facebook YouTube TikTok Instagram Pinterest RSS Feed

Get the app

Download the App
Download on the Apple App Store Get it on Google Play
  • All Places
  • Latest Places
  • Most Popular
  • Places to Eat
  • Random
  • Nearby
  • Add a Place
  • Stories
  • Food & Drink
  • Itineraries
  • Lists
  • Video
  • Podcast
  • Newsletters
  • All Trips
  • Family Trip
  • Food & Drink
  • History & Culture
  • Wildlife & Nature
  • FAQ
  • Membership
  • Feedback & Ideas
  • Community Guidelines
  • Product Blog
  • Unique Gifts
  • Work With Us
  • About
  • FAQ
  • Advertise With Us
  • Advertising Guidelines
  • Privacy Policy
  • Cookie Policy
  • Terms of Use
Atlas Obscura

© 2025 Atlas Obscura. All Rights Reserved.