The 20-year search for a home for the U.S.'s 77,000 tons of nuclear waste moved closer to a final resting place this week as the Senate approved Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the nation's official waste repository site. But in the next decade the controversy may become moot with the development of an alternative technology that bombards nuclear waste into a more benign substance.

Spent nuclear fuel remains dangerously radioactive for 10,000 years or more-one reason that storing it scares Nevada residents and scientists alike. In a study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, nuclear physicists from the University of Nevada, New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory and other organizations have concluded that one possible technique for managing nuclear waste could work on an industrial scale. The technique-bombarding waste with high-speed neutrons-would reduce both the half-life of the waste's longest-lived elements, such as plutonium, and the quantity of waste that needs to be stored.