Denver apathetic to nuke haul

Martin Kuz

Wednesday, Feb. 18, 1998 | 10:02 a.m.

DENVER -- By late afternoon Tuesday, the regulars of the Music Bar Lounge have settled onto their seats. At one end of this neighborhood watering hole west of downtown Denver, a TV is tuned to ESPN, as if the Olympics really warrant highlights. At the other, a Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin romp flickers on a second set, as if Nagano isn't bad enough.

In between, a dozen men sit facing the bartender, Sally, alternately exhaling cigarette smoke and idle chatter. If one clutches a Budweiser and sports a Broncos cap, it seems they all do. But for perhaps the only time today, the Music Bar suddenly falls quiet when Sally, a pleasant woman quick with a smile and another round, booms out a question on behalf of a visitor.

"Anybody here got anything to say about nuclear waste being hauled along the highway?"

Silence. One man lifts a bottle to his lips, another pulls his brim down. A couple of shrugs. Still nothing. Then, finally, an answer that brings slow nods all around.

"It doesn't matter what we think," says a stout, gray-haired patron hunched over his beer. "Nobody's gonna listen to us anyway."

Ten minutes away from the Music Bar, U.S. Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan want everyone -- residents, politicians and lesser creatures of the media -- to know they're listening. The Nevada Democrats are addressing members of the Denver City Council about the prospective perils of nuclear waste passing through their town en route to the Nevada Test Site, warning against what they call "this potential nightmare."

Their appearance Tuesday in Denver marked the second stop for Reid and Bryan on what has become a sort of anti-nuclear waste whistle-stop tour. While Congress mulls legislation that would create a temporary storage facility for high-level nuclear waste in Nevada, the senators hope to fan opposition to turning their state into the nation's radioactive dumping ground.

As they did last month in St. Louis, Reid and Bryan contended that the nuclear utilities industry has snow-jobbed, strong-armed and outright conned Congress and much of the country into believing that a single storage site is ultimately safer than keeping waste at each of the country's 107 nuclear reactors.

Again invoking the phrase "Mobile Chernobyl," Bryan pointed out that to reach Nevada, some 70,000 tons of nuclear waste would pass through 43 states on highways and railroads. The transfer would potentially endanger 50 million Americans who live within one mile of the routes. Trucks hauling 2,350 casks of waste would travel through Denver on Interstate 70; another 180 casks would cut through central and western Colorado on the Southern Pacific railroad.

"It's not just a Nevada problem," Reid cautioned. "It's your problem."

Yet despite the conviction shared by Reid and Bryan that only neon lights, not nuclear waste, should give the desert its nighttime glow, similar sentiments are more elusive among the very people the senators might expect to mimic their concern: residents who live and work in the shadow of I-70.

Located a John Elway pass from the highway, the Music Bar sits in the southern half of the Berkeley Park neighborhood, a middle-income enclave of turn-of-the-century homes. It's a Neighborhood Watch area, where retirees volunteer as crossing guards at Centennial Elementary School and couples feed the Canadian geese at nearby Berkeley Lake.

Kicking back with a Bud at the Music Bar after a day of pounding sheet metal, John Griffin has heard little of the nuclear waste debate. A Boston native who fled "Taxachusetts" for the fresh air of Denver six years ago, he simply knows he doesn't want radioactive fuel rods and the like stored in his backyard.

"You don't want to put it in the ocean, of course, 'cause I love seafood," said Griffin, 39. "But I guess it's better to put it in one place than all over the country, and maybe the desert is the best place."

Across the bar, James Ready argued that "you get more radiation from your microwave than you will hauling that stuff."

A couple years ago Ready helped with the preliminary cleanup of Rocky Flats, a massive weapons factory in Denver that produced plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs during the Cold War. Closed in the early 1990s, the plant will undergo more extensive cleanups in the next decade. Still, Ready's experience there has him convinced that everyday drivers on I-70 pose more of a health risk than the occasional truck hauling nuclear waste.

"I don't think there's any problem with transporting it. The Department of Energy will make sure it's perfectly safe. It's not like they're going to transport it in open containers," he said.

North of the highway, the din of late-afternoon rush hour rains down over a clutch of homes in Berkeley Park's other half. A faded green sound wall stands as the only barrier against the noise -- and anything else that might seep through. For residents here, the indignation they feel over toxins possibly rolling past their backyards is matched only by a curious resignation.

"We're a forgotten little area," said Virginia Baade, who has lived in her country cottage home for 35 years. "But what has to be done, has to be done. We know about it, but what can you do?"

Added Tab Ungphakorn, who emigrated to Denver from his native Thailand in 1962: "There's nothing really we can do about it. It (the waste) has to go somewhere, and it can't go south or north of here. It's better to take it on a highway than some smaller roads."

But what Reid and Bryan think residents in Denver and other major cities need to know is that another solution exists: leave the waste where it lies. To that end, they are fighting the temporary storage bill that Congress will revisit next month. Yet while President Clinton has vowed to veto any legislation that targets Nevada, the House likely will have enough votes to override him, so Reid and Bryan are straining to ensure that the Senate holds fast.

The Nevada lawmakers said 35 senators oppose the bill, just two more than needed to sustain a veto. Their barnstorming tour appears to be a scantily veiled effort to hike public pressure on colleagues who favor the measure -- such as Colorado Republican Wayne Allard -- in hopes of padding the margin. Allard's Senate mate, Republican Ben Nighthorse Campbell, is one of only two GOP senators opposed to the legislation.

Still, rallying Americans to the cause may prove as difficult as keeping a semi-truck on the road during a Colorado snowstorm. Despite Reid and Bryan praising Tuesday's turnout and making obligatory remarks about democracy at work, city council members and police officers outnumbered residents by a more than 3-to-1 margin.

Undeterred, Reid said if he and Bryan could somehow sit down and talk with residents, "100 percent of them" would be convinced of the risks of transporting nuclear waste cross-country.

"Just look at what happened with the spill of low-level waste in Kingman less than two months ago," said Reid, referring to a mishap that occurred with waste shipments from an Ohio nuclear factory. "If high-level nuclear waste had leaked, many people would've died for miles around."

Reid and Bryan intend to visit two to four more cities as part of their crusade, a push that also will help them in their fight against Congress designating Yucca Mountain, located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a permanent nuclear waste storage site. Yet because they won't get face time with every last resident for a quick chat on the dangers of nuclear waste, the road ahead, so to speak, is hardly free of hazards.

"It's gotta go somewhere," said George Gerk, 65, flipping bread crumbs to the geese at Berkeley Park. "It's for the good of the nation, right?"

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