nuclear waste storage

At the end of this tunnel, which snakes as deep as 820 feet below the Hungarian countryside, lies a new long-term nuclear-waste facility, set to open in 2010. Located on the outskirts of the village of Bátaapáti, it will store more than 10.5 million gallons of low- and intermediate-level waste produced at the Paks nuclear power plant, which is 40 miles away. The waste consists of protective clothing and contaminated tools and materials from processing. It collectively accounts for 97 percent of the volume of radioactive waste from the plant.

Give a kid a beach and he’ll MAKE a sandcastle; give a man a billion dollars and he’ll build the world’s tallest building. The urge to engineer big is elemental. “The same aspirations to celebrate and uplift the spirit that drove the Egyptians to build the pyramids are still driving us,” says Henry Petroski, a professor of history and civil engineering at Duke University and the author of To Engineer Is Human. “The things we’re doing differ only in magnitude.”

But new technology always ups the magnitude ante.