Yucca Mountain

Yucca Mountain, some 160 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas, blends unobtrusively into the desert landscape. Yet it's no ordinary place. A Bechtel team studied Yucca Mountain as the proposed site for the United States' first national nuclear waste repository —where spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste can be be stored permanently.

In the early 1980s, the U.S. government green-lighted an initiative to find a safe, secure way to dispose of the nation’s growing nuclear waste. Almost immediately, hundreds of world-class engineers, geologists, seismologists, volcanologists, chemists, and other specialists converged on Yucca Mountain. Starting in 2001, Bechtel and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) teamed up to conduct even more extensive studies, computer modeling, and sophisticated analytic surveys exploring the site’s potential as a repository.

In addition to research, Bechtel SAIC helped its customer, the U.S. Department of Energy, prepare a licensing application for the site, which was submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June 2008.