Page "Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository" Paragraph 57

" Some of the waste is already vitrified.

There is, in my mind, no economical reason why you would ever think of pulling it back into a potential fuel cycle.

So one could well imagine — again, it depends on what the blue-ribbon panel says — one could well imagine that for a certain classification for a certain type of waste, you don't want to have access to it anymore, so that means you could use different sites than Yucca Mountain, such as salt domes.

Once you put it in there, the salt oozes around it.

These are geologically stable for a 50 to 100 million year time scale.

The trouble with those type of places for repositories is you don't have access to it anymore.

But say for certain types of waste you don't want to have access to it anymore — that's good.

It's a very natural containment.

... whereas there would be other waste where you say it has some inherent value, let's keep it around for a hundred years, two hundred years, because there's a high likelihood we'll come back to it and want to recover that.