AFTER $10 billion spent, countless papers and a large helping of controversy, are we any closer to knowing whether Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert offers a secure resting place for America's nuclear legacy?

For two senior geologists, the debate is over and it's time to forge ahead. Last week, Isaac Winograd and Eugene Roseboom, who did pioneering studies of nuclear storage in the 1980s, argued that the project should proceed, albeit cautiously, with a pilot facility followed by staged expansion over several decades (Science, vol 320, p 1426). They are not the first to suggest this - a National Academy of Sciences study urged a similar approach five years ago - but are they right?

Congress selected Yucca Mountain as a proposed underground repository in 1987 because of its arid and remote location, mostly within a nuclear test site. Less than 20 centimetres of rain falls each ...