All the effort by the feds to determine whether Nevada’s Yucca Mountain would be a suitable place to permanently store the country’s nuclear waste can be summed up as “a failed scientific process,” according to a draft report by the General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency. The report, which has been obtained by several newspapers, comes at a difficult time for the Bush administration, which was expected to throw its weight behind the Yucca proposal this winter and push for the storage space to be opened by 2010. The GAO report says the Energy Department “is unlikely to achieve its goal of opening a repository at Yucca Mountain by 2010 and has no reliable estimate of when, and at what cost, such a repository could be opened.”
