The United States is struggling to cope with the legacy of its nuclear power and atomic weapons programme.

Hundreds of tons of nuclear waste have been generated by American power stations and scores of unwanted H-bombs are also in need of a permanent site where they can be stored for centuries without danger.

The US Department of Energy thinks the answer is to bury the highly radioactive material in special storage chambers several miles underground beneath Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert.

The Department of Energy has already spent $3bn (£1.8bn) digging out a series of labyrinthine tunnels but now the project could be scuppered by a seismic survey which suggests the mountain's crust is unstable.

Nevada acts as guinea pig

Nevada's Democrat Senator Richard Bryan says: "The preliminary scientific data indicates there are serious problems.

"Nevada is second or third in the nation in terms of active earthquake zones and we have had a number of earthquakes."

But many people in Nevada are used to the federal government using their state as a guinea pig. American and British military scientists conducted 800 nuclear tests in the state between 1950 and 1989.

The Mayor of Callente welcomes the jobs the scheme would create

The mayor of nearby Callente, Kevin Phillips, has no problem with the Yucca Mountain project and sees it as the ideal way to breathe new life into the ghost town.

The plan is for the waste to be brought to Callente by train in special nuclear containers and then transferred to trucks for the last leg of the journey.

Mr Phillips says: "The real risks are miniscule. They are extremely small but the perception is that they're huge."

He points out that 50,000 shipments of hazardous non-nuclear material already comes through Callente every year without incident.

"Chemicals, explosives, stuff that could really cause some serious damage and death. If one of these tank cars was to puncture we would never get out of the canyon," he says.

Nuclear waste would be brought to Callente by train

The Department of Energy is using a film made by Britain's Central Electricity Generating Board in the 1980s to persuade local people nuclear containers are safe. The video shows a train smashing into an empty nuclear container at high speed without damaging it.

But fears were increased recently when barrels of low-level nuclear risk were found to be leaking when they arrived at a reception site near Yucca Mountain.

The project is already years behind schedule and nuclear stockpiles are building up at various power stations and military installations all over the US.

But experts worry that if America, with its large areas of wilderness and huge budget, has trouble finding a place for its nuclear legacy, what hope is there for smaller countries like Britain or poorer nations like Russia or the Ukraine?

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