Last Memorial Day, as I drove along U.S. Highway 93 on my way to McGill, the small northern Nevada town where I was born, I made a special effort to look around at the rugged desert scenery. Sometimes called “the loneliest road in America,” Highway 93 and the isolated sagebrush covered hills surrounding it have become, for me, synonymous with home, family and friends. Since my parents moved from McGill when I was six years old, I have made the journey back countless times. The openness of the desert, the deer in the hills and the nearby towns with simple names like Ely, Ruth and Cherry Creek are quiet reminders that rural Nevada still holds a remarkable amount of beauty and tradition.
If President Bush and U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham get their way, however, rural Nevada will also hold much more. It will hold 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, to be exact. After nearly 20 years of scientific study costing $4 billion, the Bush administration finally gave the go-ahead last month to the Yucca Mountain project. The project would become the nation’s first (and only) permanent repository for nuclear waste from all parts of the country.
As expected, Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn vetoed the Department of Energy’s decision. However, the House of Representatives approved a measure to override the governor’s veto last month, and Senate approval is now the only remaining obstacle to turning Nevada’s desert hills into the nation’s nuclear dumping ground. Nevada’s two Senators are working hard to stop the measure’s passage, but unless other Senators also join the fight, it looks like the Nevadans are going to get dumped on.
Despite the DOE’s claims to the contrary, the Yucca Mountain project still has many unresolved problems. To begin with, the geological viability of the site is far from proven. Penelope Purdy, a member of the Denver Post’s editorial board, for instance, described in a recent column how a government geologist downplayed the concern that Yucca Mountain, which was formed thousands of years ago through volcanic activity, might erupt again. The geologist said such concerns were insignificant since “the kind of volcano likely to surface here wouldn’t explode like Mount St. Helens.” Translation: Volcanic activity is still possible. Since the waste at Yucca Mountain would remain lethal for another 10,000 years, the possibility of an eruption?even a relatively small one and even in the very distant future?sends shivers down any rational person’s spine. Earthquakes also remain a concern. In the mid-1990s, a federal building within sight of the Yucca Mountain project was damaged in a tremor.
The project’s advocates have also failed to adequately address the possibility that radioactive waste might seep into groundwater. DOE officials don’t deny that such a problem is possible, even inevitable. Instead, they downplay the concerns, arguing that contamination wouldn’t occur for 10,000 to 100,000 years. Experience, however, shows that such a possibility may not be as distant as the DOE’s pencil pushers think. In Washington state, for instance, radionucleotides from the DOE’s Hanford facility have begun appearing in groundwater less than a decade after the facility’s construction.
The problem of transportation also looms large. Admittedly, there are no documented (heavy emphasis) instances of radioactive material being released during transport. However, as Guinn insists, the chances that not a single one of the approximately 96,000 shipments required to bring the nasty stuff to Nevada will go awry are pretty low. As governor of Nevada, a state that specializes in figuring the odds, Guinn ought to know.
Proponents of the site answer these concerns with what seems like an impenetrable argument: The waste has to go somewhere, and it might as well be Yucca Mountain. They claim that no reasonable alternative exists.
This argument, however, ignores the fact that the DOE has never studied another site with any seriousness. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 designated Yucca Mountain as the only site to be examined as a possible permanent repository. The DOE’s scientists, therefore, have spent most of the last 20 years and $4 billion trying to justify the site’s viability, not testing hypotheses and asking questions.
Topping it all off is a threat to residents of another Western desert state: Utah. The Goshute Indian Tribe is attempting to obtain approval for a temporary nuclear storage facility in Tooele County on the tribe’s reservation. The facility, which would hold waste in unsafe above-ground containers, could threaten the health of everyone along the Wasatch Front. If the utilities dumping waste at the site go bankrupt and can’t move it when the Yucca Mountain project is completed 12 years from now, the radioactive fuel will be stuck with nowhere to go but the aquifers surrounding Salt Lake.
With such large problems on the horizon, the Yucca Mountain Project could mean many things for rural Nevada. It could mean environmental disaster anytime between now and millennia in the future. It could also mean financial hardship as property values decline along shipping routes and in areas close to the project. Most importantly, and most certainly, the project will mean a diminished quality of life. As mammoth trucks bearing radioactive caskets rumble down Main Street in McGill, the tranquility of my desert hometown will be lost. In place of the fragrant sagebrush, juniper and pine, the stench of diesel exhaust and toxic waste will rise.
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