Editorial: There’s no room for error

Thursday, May 31, 2001 | 8:43 a.m.

Precision in science isn't just important -- it's everything. For instance, in 1999 the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in space because of a navigation error. The catastrophic failure was caused by an engineer who didn't convert English measurement units into metric before the mission was launched. It is this kind of mistake that makes the recent revelations about scientific miscalculations on the Yucca Mountain Project all that more disturbing.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which ultimately will decide whether to grant the Department of Energy a license to build a high-level nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, has discovered a number of errors in computer models and hand calculations by the DOE. While DOE officials assert that the errors shouldn't impact their assessment of how Yucca Mountain would stand up over time, the fact is they're troubling. In one example, the DOE mistakenly calculated the chemistry inside the waste packages. As the Sun's Mary Manning reported, if there is a higher acid content inside the buried containers than the DOE estimates, then the waste packages could deteriorate faster -- possibly within 1,000 years -- allowing radiation to escape the dumpsite.

The stakes involving Yucca Mountain are extraordinary -- 77,000 tons of man's deadliest waste would be entombed in Nevada if the federal government were to give a green light to the project. The latest miscalculations by scientists, when joined together with the accumulating evidence about the danger of storing nuclear waste there, is even more reason why the federal government should abandon this project.