Nevada

A Nuclear Family Vacation is published by Bloomsbury.

The opening scene of the newest Indiana Jones film is set in Nevada in 1957, possibly during Operation Plumbbob, an actual nuclear-test series in which the U.S. measured the response of humans and physical structures to nuclear blasts. Satellite images give a hint of what's left: a pockmarked brown landscape of craters and broken buildings. There are smashed reinforced-concrete domes, shattered windows, as well as iron rails and bridges that the heat and explosion have twisted. It looks, I am told, like a place where Superman (or perhaps Uri Geller) had given himself over to a fit of rage.

The Department of Energy is preparing to submit an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to store radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, under a plan endorsed by John McCain.

The word "mountain" has lovely connotations: icy streams, conifer forests, unblemished views of a snowy sierra, yodeling competitions. (OK, so not they're not all lovely.) Alas for Yucca Mountain, these images of alpine sweetness do not apply to it at all. If Yucca Mountain had a name that conveyed just how baking-hot, barren, forlorn, and lifeless it is -- perhaps "Yucca Death Vault" would do it justice -- more people might see the logic in the government's plan, now nearly thirty years old, to use it to store the nation's radioactive garbage. The mountain is dry, geologically appropriate, and far enough from human settlements to keep it secure in case of accident or attack. Nevadans and anti-nuke activists object and say that the risk of leaks, of terrorist attacks, and of unforeseen catastrophes is too great to allow Yucca Mountain to accept the waste. But the waste has to go somewhere, and Yucca Mountain is the right spot.

The Las Vegas police found ricin, a chemical weapons agent, in a Las Vegas hotel room rented by Roger Von Bergendorff, a 57-year-old computer graphics artist and pet enthusiast.

Extracting ricin -- so potent that a single drop could kill you and your whole family -- isn't difficult, which is why a man with obvious social handicaps and no relevant training apparently succeeded in producing enough to poison himself half to death. Governments have made breathless claims about Al Qaeda's desire to weaponize the chemical, and the dubious success of this poor man's homebrew will stoke the fears of the stokeable. MORE