If you've never lived in Nevada, it's easy to imagine Yucca Mountain as very close to the middle of nowhere. To get there from Las Vegas, you have to drive northwest into the desert for two and a half hours. At the intersection of Routes 95 and 373, you take a right into the Nevada Test Site, where the government conducted nuclear bomb tests, and pass through a security gate. You then drive another 30 kilometers past Little Skull Mountain and through Jackass Flats, until you come to a small sign that says "Top of Yucca Mountain," at which point you turn left onto a gravel road and head upward.

At the top, you'll find two concrete benches, a rusty sign proclaiming the altitude in meters and feet (1,507.5 and 4,946, respectively), a decrepit National Weather Service trailer, a porta-potty, and a view of nothing but scrub brush, arid buttes and the occasional volcanic cone. At nine in the morning on a typical sun-blessed August day, it's already hot enough to cause sunstroke, if not imminent heat exhaustion-although it is a dry heat, to put it mildly. The mountain gets less than 20 centimeters of rain a year, and only about a centimeter sticks around long enough to soak into the soil and percolate down through the mountain.