Editorial: Warning — Nuke waste on board

Tuesday, Feb. 10, 1998 | 10:44 a.m.

In a report released Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy acknowledged that 11 containers with radioactive sludge coming to the Nevada Test Site from a DOE facility in Ohio had failed in the past year. According to the DOE, one of the boxes even exploded before it left the Fernald, Ohio, facility where uranium was once processed for nuclear weapons. As if that's not bad enough, the public wasn't notified of any of these failures until December 1997, when a truck driver contacted the DOE about water dripping from his trailer during a stop in Kingman, Ariz.

Nevada's congressional delegation was alarmed by the DOE's latest revelations. "If we can't even build a safe canister to ship low-level waste, how can we even begin to imagine shipping the most dangerous substance known to mankind across the nation's highways and railways," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. Congress should shelve any plans to require Nevada to receive high-level nuclear waste until all safety questions, including storage and transportation, have been adequately addressed.