The Yucca Mountain discussion moves me to reminisce (from Massachusetts today).
Back in 1960 I was a grad student at Cal and my wife was expecting
our first child. Evelyn was at that time a radiochemist working at
the Crocker radiation laboratory on campus, planning to retire when
the baby was born. We were offered the opportunity to participate in
an attractive experiment relating to Sr90 uptake in infants. Crocker
had acquired a large number of cases of canned milk from a
pre-nuclear testing era. The pasturage on which the cows had grazed
was free of Sr90, as was the milk. Crocker scientists wanted to
measure the amount of Sr90 taken up by infants fed ordinary
contemporary canned milk with the uptake in infants fed pre-testing
milk. To do this they had to collect the excreta of the infants as
well as assaying their diets. The lab would provide all of the
infant's food. new diapers, and would collect the used diapers for
assay. It was a good deal, to say the least, and we considered
signing on for the program.
So much for the experiment. We ultimately decided not to participate
since Evelyn chose to breast feed our little Diane (now an Associate
Professor of Anthropology at University of Alberta - I had to get
that in). An amusing thing happened when I was telling my old room
mate about this in his office at Cal. His office mate, with whom I
was unacquainted, came in half way through the story. He then went
home and told his wife about the monster fellow grad student he knew
who was volunteering his unborn child for a radioisotope experiment!
I found this out later when he joined our research group.