Yucca Mountain Nuke Dump Above Fault Line

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Engineers moved some planned structures at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump after rock samples indicated a fault line unexpectedly ran beneath their original location, an Energy Department official said Monday.

Bob Loux, head of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects and the state's chief anti-Yucca administrator, said he was not reassured by what he called "just-in-time engineering."

"This represents a complete lack of understanding about the site's characteristics," Loux said. "They've been out there for 25 years or longer. And they get surprises like this. This is basic geology, stuff they should have known all along."

Congress in 2002 picked Yucca Mountain to become the nation's nuclear waste dump, with plans calling for entombing 77,000 tons of spent radioactive fuel hauled to Nevada from 39 states. But the plan has been delayed by legal challenges, money shortages, scientific controversies and political opposition. Planners now concede the dump won't open before 2017.

A panel consultant, seismologist Leon Reiter, who was at the meeting, said more than 10 faults within a 20-mile radius of Yucca Mountain could generate ground motion.

He said one fault, the Solitario Canyon just west of the planned repository, is capable of producing an earthquake with a magnitude of about 6.5.