Byline: JESSICA MATHEWS
For more than 40 years, this country has single-mindedly pursued a nuclear waste disposal plan that is not going to work. In all that time, only one person in a position to change it has perceived its inescapable flaw.
The plan is to dispose of nuclear wastes once and forever in a deep hole in the ground. A repository would be built, filled and sealed.
This difficult, new technology must work perfectly the first time, protecting the wastes for 10,000 years.
There can be no pilot project, no improving of the technology, no learning curve; yet there must be public confidence that it will work.
It was former defense and energy secretary James Schlesinger who saw that this strategy violates every principle of sound engineering and also may be a political contradiction in …
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