Mount Doomsday, though a work of fiction, deals with a very serious problem. Namely, what to do with the ever growing volume of radioactive waste generated by nuclear plants, weapons research, the medical industry, etc. Since the time of the Manhattan Project (when the first atomic bomb was developed in the 1940s) highly toxic radioactive waste has been accumulating. Originally only the United States was involved, but over the decades an ever growing number of countries have joined the list of those possessing and producing radioactive waste. These dangerous materials have variously been stored in metal drums, buried underground, kept in pools of water, even dumped in the ocean. Every one of these methods is neither fail-safe nor adequate in the long run. Though all are aware of the problem not one country has even remotely addressed it in a meaningful way. Russia, perhaps the worst offender of all, has allowed huge areas of its countryside to become contaminated, even unlivable. Readers should understand that we are not talking about the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation, another serious issue, but rather the more simplistic issue of what to do with materials that have a radioactive half-life of thousands of years. The government of the United States is working on a project to store huge quantities of these materials beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Unfortunately, despite the fact that billions have been spent on research and development of the site there are those who contend it is not geologically stable enough to entrust it with the long term storage of these hazardous substances.