Once there was a mountainin the desert of Nevada.Brown and bare, the mountain wasn'tmuch to look at. It was an ugly duckling of a mountain, longer than it washigh, a ridge rather than a peak. It was hardly distinguishable from the mesas and buttes around it. The material of this mountain had been created 15 million years earlier, when the ash from a series of tremendous volcanic explosions solidified. Though laced with fractures, the rock of the mountain conducted hardly any water from the surface, because the rainfall in the region was so slight. Most of the moisture flowed off the mountain or evaporated before it could penetrate the ground. The water table, known as the Amargosa aquifer, lay 1,400 feet below the desert floor and 2,400 feet below the mountain crest. At some point in time, a group of human beings put dangerous radioactive waste into the dry heart of the mountain. After watching over the stuff for a century or two, until they were satisfied their plan would work, these human beings closed up their tunnels into the mountain and went away. Then, about 10,000 years later, give or take a millennium, some of the radioactive waste leaked out of the mountain. It crept southward on the pathways of the deep groundwater. Now it happened that a man named Bruce lived 11 miles south of the brown mountain. Bruce kept a little vegetable garden, which he watered from his drinking well. One day, without noticing it, Bruce began consuming water that was slightly more radioactive than usual. Since his vegetables were also tainted, his ingestion of radioactivity went up further. The result was that each time he ate from his garden or drank from his well, his chances of contracting a fatal cancer increased. Although they were long dead, the people who had put the nuclear waste into the mountain knew all about Bruce. They had planned for his existence and his way of life, which they called rural-residential. They didn't call him Bruce, however. They called him the Reasonably Maximally Exposed Individual, which was regulatory jargon for this person and others like him. Most important, the nuclear waste managers had calculated the odds as to whether Bruce would become fatally ill because of the poison in the mountain. They decided that his risk was far too low—less than one chance in a billion—to rule out storing the waste there. And if Bruce's health risks were acceptable, it followed that other Nevadans of the future would be all right, too, because they would live farther away from the brown mountain and their water would be less contaminated.
Power cables, ventilation tubes, and railcars plunge into Yucca Mountain via the North Portal Entrance. The 25-foot-diameter tunnel leads to test facilities located two miles within the mountain, where canisters of nuclear waste may one day be housed.
