The Yucca Mountain solution is the best way to deal with
the current situation. But it is not the only possible solution.
An alternative solution could become practical in ten or
twenty years if sufficient support were available. I was
following the "other solution" ideas up to the Third
International Conference on ADTTA in 1999 (which I
attended) and summarized what I learned at this website:
It is an article written with two French coauthors. For
some reason I was not able to pesuade The American
Scientist to publish this article. Feel free to share it with
your students.
The ADTTA, by the way, stands for the Accelerator-
Driven Transmutation Technologies and Applications.
The main idea it to turn long-lived radioactive isotopes
into isotopes which are either stable or decay much
more rapidly. It is not a science fiction project.
Ludwik Kowalski