Climbing Yucca Mountain.(Scan: Short news and commentary)

"As you can see, Yucca Mountain isn't really a mountain," says our guide as we near the end of an hour-long bus ride north from Las Vegas. "It's only a ridge. No one knows how it got the name 'Yucca' either. There aren't many yucca plants around here," he continues. "It's mostly mesquite bushes."

Once every month, the Department of Energy offers a public tour of Yucca Mountain, the once and future (perhaps) site of America's nuclear waste repository. At 7:30 a.m., our group has picked up our box lunches and boarded four tour buses headed for the remote site. It's an interesting collection of people. They all profess neutrality and insists they are just looking for facts.

"We should have gone nuclear 20 years ago," says Tom Lipiec, a film equipment manufacturer who has driven up for the day from Los Angeles. "We wouldn't be putting all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We wouldn't be dependent on foreign oil either. We could have hydrogen cars by now."

If our group seems relatively unfazed by the idea of storing stainless steel canisters 1,500 feet underground as the price for resolving several major environmental and geopolitical dilemmas, we are an unrepresentative sampling. Almost everyone in Nevada is passionately opposed to the project. "I went to a public hearing a few months ago and it was awful," says my seatmate, Dick Telfer, an 83-year-old former science teacher. "Anybody who spoke in favor of it was shouted down."

At the foot of the ridge, we disembark and clamber into a fleet of minivans that takes us up a bumpy rock-strewn road to the summit. There a DOE geologist with a ponytail to his waist discourses passionately for 25 minutes on why the risks of any radiation escaping from the area bedrock are infinitesimally small. "We've found that small water deposits trapped in this rock haven't moved significantly for 10,000 years," he reports.

The reason Yucca Mountain is not moving forward at the moment is because last year environmentalists convinced a federal judge that the 10,000-year standard established by the EPA for radioactive emissions from the site was not adequate. The EPA has been ordered to prove emission will not exceed 360 millirems for the next one million years. There was no mention of how the court plans to monitor the results.

Our next stop is the north entrance to the five-mile "exploratory" tunnel that DOE drilled into the mountain between 1994 and 1997. The boring tool was a 100-yard-long freight-train-like vehicle fitted with a 25-foot-radius drill bit that had to be replaced almost every day. It now sits at the south entrance. "We're trying to sell it," says our guide. "Want to make an offer?"