"The nation's nuclear waste dump proposed for Nevada is poorly designed and could leak highly radioactive waste, a scientist who recently resigned from a federal panel of experts on Yucca Mountain tells the Associated Press."

Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is planned to begin receiving waste in 2010. Some 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at commercial and military sites in 39 states would be stored in metal canisters underground in tunnels.

"‘If we get high-temperature liquids, the metal [in the canisters] would corrode and that would eventually lead to leakage of nuclear waste," Paul Craig, a physicist and engineering professor at the University of California-Davis, says.

"Therefore, it is a bad design. And that is very, very bad news for the Department of Energy because they are committed to that design."