Norbert T. Rempe, a retired geologist who worked alongside Jim Conca at WIPP for years, is one of these pro-nuclear scientists. Born and raised in Germany, he thinks that country’s government is "bonkers" for promising to abandon its nuclear program by 2022. He calls the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters "peanuts." Chernobyl was "a technical mess," he said. "But how many people really died as a result of Chernobyl? So far, roughly 50. And the danger that’s supposedly out there, that tens of thousands or millions of people died? You will never be able to statistically find those people." Regarding Fukushima, the problem wasn’t nuclear waste: "Not one person has gotten serious radiation poisoning or died of it," he said. "The only people so far who have died as a result of Fukushima are people like the farmer who was forced to evacuate and rather than evacuating he hanged himself."

Rempe considers nuclear waste nothing to worry about. Hanson agrees, equating fear of nuclear waste to fear of flying (or perhaps fear of crashing). People afraid to fly, he points out, often have no qualms driving, even though tens of thousands more people die every year in car accidents than in plane wrecks.

"You stagger around, disoriented, and then keel over and die."

"We have something quite similar with nuclear power," he said. "Even in the wake of Fukushima, people have become reasonably comfortable with the reactor. The reactor has the potential to be dangerous. If mismanaged, it can cause a catastrophe. But not the waste. And yet, for some reason, people are more afraid of the waste. Which defies logic. The waste is stationary. It doesn’t go anywhere. Every day it’s less hazardous than the day before." He would have no problem living next to a nuclear waste repository. "We’ve got to get to a point where we can look at these things in context," he said. "It’s not like this stuff’s going to come up out of the ground and kill people."

Dr. Kim Kearfott is a professor of nuclear engineering, radiological sciences, and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan. She specializes in radiation detection, internal radiation dose assessment, and radiation safety practices. In the 1990s, she was integral to studies about possible radiation exposure at Yucca. She is, in other words, familiar with radiological nuclear waste risks.

Kearfott calls Hanson’s assessment too simplistic. Two kinds of effects concern her, neither involving waste coming out of the ground to kill people.

The first is statistical, she explained — the probability that someone receiving a relatively low dose of radiation will develop cancer or genetic defects. None of these effects can be certain; they’re based on often widely speculative probabilities. "This is really the complexity of siting a waste site," she said. "Scientists on site are in a predictive mode. And what makes it more difficult is that you’re trying to predict health risks tens of thousands of years from now based often on whether or not there might be a collective memory in the future that nuclear waste is buried in this spot."

Then there are deterministic effects — what will happen to someone exposed to high levels of radiation. The modern unit measuring exposure is the "gray," and the first responders at Chernobyl received between three and five gray. The victims suffered acute radiation syndrome. Their bone marrow stopped functioning. In many cases their bodies could not produce new blood. Fifty percent of them died within 60 days.

Exposure between five and 15 gray causes severe gastrointestinal problems, including difficulty holding down food. Rarely does anyone survive such extreme doses.

Above 15 gray, the brain and nerves malfunction. "You stagger around, disoriented, and then keel over and die," she said. "It might take a short while but you will die within five days, usually sooner."

But these effects are less relevant to nuclear waste once it’s underground. Kearfott said someone would need to be "right there with the waste" to experience serious radiation sickness or death.

But there are other risks. How likely is it that a truck driver transporting waste might fall asleep and wreck? What’s the possibility someone might fire a rocket at a rail car holding high-level waste? What happens if there’s a major earthquake near Yucca? Risk analysts — and local communities — need to weigh these questions, Kearfott said.

Hanson, however, is less than impressed with the argument and the risk. Yes, spent fuel would pose a danger if it escaped a shipping container, he said. But being solid, it can’t leak green goop into the environment like in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Daredevil scenarios. It contains gases, but they’re welded and bolted safely into thick steel and concrete containers. "The only possibility of having any release whatsoever would be a malicious attack on one of the shipping containers with very sophisticated anti-armor weaponry," he said.

He then repeated a point he brought up before: "Really, I want to stress that I would have no problem keeping one of these shipping containers in my backyard."

I told him people might offer to take him up on that. "People, particularly people in Las Vegas, seem to think there’s potential risk in those shipping containers, that radiation will get out," I told him.

He responded curtly: "Well, it won’t."