Joseph R. Egan, a nuclear engineer-turned-lawyer who led Nevada’s legal campaign to block a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, died May 7 at his home in Naples, Fla. He was 53.
The cause was gastroesophageal cancer, his family said.
Mr. Egan, in an obituary he wrote weeks ago that was posted on his law firm’s Web site after his death, said he had arranged for his ashes to be spread at Yucca Mountain, in southern Nevada, with the words “radwaste buried here only over my dead body.”
Mr. Egan’s wife, Patricia, said by telephone last week that Mr. Egan had been cremated, adding, “We are going to do it.”
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Legal challenges by Mr. Egan’s firm, Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch, have helped set back the Energy Department’s project at Yucca by years. In 2001 he filed a lawsuit raising a variety of legal objections to the site, which was chosen by Congress. In 2004 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with one challenge, that the repository should be judged over 1 million years, not over 10,000 years as the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency had planned.
The Yucca project’s fate is not clear today.