Yucca Mountain as a Drone Control Site?

President Obama zeroed out funding in 2010 for the Yucca Mountain, Nev., site the Energy Department had spent decades and $9 billion to develop as the country's sole storage site for nuclear waste, and Monday the Government Accountability Office hatched a few ideas on what to do with that expensive and now unwanted facility.

The site includes a five mile tunnel -- replete with railroad tracks -- bored into the mountain, and GAO said an unnamed "stakeholder" suggested the tunnel would make a dandy place for secure control of Predator UAVs currently managed from Creech Air Force Base, some 40 miles away, where hackers may or may not have hacked the drone control systems.

Another suggestion, GAO said, was to turn the tunnel into a secure data storage facility, while another recommended using it as a mock subway tunnel to train first responders.

Alas, it turns out that even though Energy spent megabucks on the Yucca complex, much of the infrastructure is 30 years old, has not been maintained very well for the past couple of years and would require considerable spiffing up before being converted to any other use.

I guess that's what happens when you don't take care of a mountain.