I'm unclear as to why several folks here have made the tremendous leaps from "There have been an unusually large number of relativly small earthquakes in that previously relatively quiet area over there" to "Gee, an enormous caudera may be about to open up and kill us all" to "an enormous caldera could open up under the Yucca Mountain nulear waste repository and kill us all". There is about as much chance of a brand spanking new cauldera forming at the New Madrid fault.
The Yucca Mountain site is over 600 miles away from Yellowstone. It is hardly
Caulderas don't form in a vaccuum. There have to be extrusions to the surface from the core. You find them under Yellowstone, the Hawaiian Islands and elsewhere about the globe. Not so much under Yucca Mountain If one did form, it would not happen in an instant or overnight. Think in terms of hundreds or thousands of years for the finger of doom to rise to the surface. There is nothing to suggest that a huge lava chamber has formed under Nevada.
As far as the radioactive waste, some perspective might be helpful. YOU are radioactive. Everything on the planet has radioactive elements. The reason that the core of the Earth has remained hot for at least 4.5 billion years is that the core is radioactive.
Even if the whole Yucca Mountain complex was destroyed by a HUGE earthquake, the result would not be a deadly mushroom cloud. The waste would be trapped under thousands of feet of rubble.
We live on floating islands of rock floating on a ball of melted radioactive super-dense rock.
Folks in the region would be well served to take precautions for continued earthquake activity; but the hyperboly, fun though it may be, makes about as much sense as the recent fuss about the Apophus asteroid.( A kid in Germany got a lot of ink because he said that NASA had miscalculated the chance of the NEO impact in twenty years. The fact that it was HIS math that was wrong got much less ink that his alarming annoucements. Perhaps the David vs. Goliath aspect gave the story legs.)
This is not to say that nuclear waste is harmless, or that nuclear weapons aren't dangerous, or that our goverment and many others haven't made stupid choices that endangered and killed innocent citizens, or that.
If I am completely oof base, and a cauldera were to spontaniously open under Yucca Mountain then the radioactice waste would really be the LEAST of our problems.
Oh, and BTW: The short half-life radioisotopes are much more dangerous than the long-lived ones. If this was not true, then the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not have been resettled after being blasted. Both are thriving cities. The radiation levels while certainly deadly on August 6 and 9 of 1945, are now essentially at backgound level now. You can stand right next to a Plutonium weapon core or hold it in your latex-gloved hand without any harm As long as the metal isn't introduced internally (i.e. breathed into the lungs, or absorbed into bone tissue). Do the same thing with concentrated Cobalt 60, and you could die within hours.
Then you would not have to worry about earthquakes.
P.S. Donuel. The explanation you give for "scaler weapons" bouncing off the ionosphere and causing earthquakes is complete nonsense. Whereas ionization effects of high altitude weapons would be distributed along magnetic force lines along the North-South axis of the magnetic field, NO physical pressure waves of any kind would be reflected by the ionosphere. Certainly there would not be ANY measurable pressure tranfer at the distant surface other than an attenuated blast wave through the lower atmosphere.
Scaler weapons??? Show me any schematic or other plans for scaler weapons that don't amount to large bunker buster bombs. You imply that And who would build a weapon that would destroy your whole planet. Even the largest bomb ever set off, the Soviet 100 MT Tsar Bomba was only tested at 1/2 power, then never tested or followed up on again.
Perhaps you could explain how radiant blast forces could be directed from a weapon, banking off the corner pocket bumper of the decidedly non-solid ionosphere, like sound off a wall and causing a quake without falling prey to our old friend, the Inverse Square Law.
I prefer science fiction that is based at least reasonable science, not scary sounding buzzwords.