“The U.S. has to deal with the issue of nuclear waste regardless of whether they build any more reactors,� said Ariel Levite, the former Principal Deputy Director General for Policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. “The U.S. has the least intelligent solution — spending billions on interim storage.�  The question of storing nuclear waste is still in front of the U.S. he said, adding, “Yucca Mountain ain’t going to work� because of politics and sheer capacity. And by the way -- Yucca Mountain has quite a bit of seismic activity -- not a great idea for an above-ground storage site. Dean S. Engelhardt, a nuclear design engineer has a patent on an invention that he claims will completely eliminate nuclear waste from our environment by sending it to the center of the earth.  Well, to the surface of the inner core, anyway. His early stage company is Permanent RadWaste Solutions. “Solve the waste problem and you solve the contamination problem for nuclear power and make it a green method of power,� Engelhardt said. The container for the waste is called a Submarine Transport Vehicle (STV) and is similar to a nuclear submarine that uses the seabed as a transit medium, not a dumping ground. The nuclear waste starts its journey in a 75-foot deep hole in the seabed at a subduction fault in the Pacific Ocean. A subduction fault is an earthquake fault at the edge of a continental crust that is in collision with the adjoining oceanic crust. It sounds a bit far-fetched, but Permanent RadWaste Solutions has a process that uses a subduction fault to send the waste to the center of the earth in what Engelhardt  claims is a permanent, zero maintenance, less expensive and terrorist-proof solution to the nuclear waste problem. To do this requires burying a specially designed pressure-and-temperature-compensating submersible transport vehicle in the sediments at a subduction fault. The seals on the STV are dynamic and maintain a slight difference in pressure as it descends; the internal pressure being slightly less than the external pressure, insuring that any leak would travel from outside in with the continuing slow descent of the STV. The slow progress of the STV in the fault means that the waste will be harmless by the time it reaches the magma in a few million years. Once buried in the seabed at a subduction fault, the waste cannot go anywhere but down.  Gravity eliminates the chance that the waste can return to the surface in a volcano. The ultimate goal of this concept is not getting the waste to the earth’s core, but to subject it to the increasing pressures of the descent for the first million years or so. Engelhardt  quotes the recently deceased Dr. James Warf, one of the original nuclear scientists on the Manhattan project, as saying that this is the only concept he’s seen that will eliminate nuclear waste.