School children join cry against Nevada nuke dump

Scott Sonner

Thursday, Dec. 2, 1999 | 9:57 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - Junior high students with painted faces joined local activists and state officials condemning the Energy Department's proposal to build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

"I don't appreciate your generation taking your mistakes and putting them into my generation's lap to fix," Daniel Kinder, a student at Billinghurst Middle School, said during a DOE hearing Wednesday.

The public hearings moved to Carson City today for the DOE's draft environmental statement on the proposed site at Yucca Mountain.

Wendy Dixon, the Las Vegas-based manager of DOE's environmental review at the proposed site at Yucca Mountain, said all comments are welcome. But she said the most useful comments respond directly to the draft EIS.

"I'd like to make sure people are reacting based on an understanding of the document instead of an emotional reaction," Dixon said.

John Hadder, an activist for Citizen Alert, said both scientific and unscientific testimony are appropriate.

"I'd say there are certain emotions, and why not? Why shouldn't there be? We are human beings, not machines," he said.

The hearings were being held as Sen. Harry Reid accused the Energy Department of trying to change the rules in the middle of the game.

Reid, D-Nev., said a DOE proposal published in the Federal Register on Tuesday would lower the standards by which the high-level radioactive storage facility could be located at Yucca Mountain northwest of Las Vegas.

"This is a transparent effort to change the rules of the game in the third quarter. It's a rule change that could threaten the health and safety of the people of Nevada," he said Wednesday.

Reid, the assistant Democratic leader in the Senate who has endorsed Vice President Al Gore for president, attacked the proposed rule change in a letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

He said the proposal would alter previous guidelines disqualifying the site if it were shown that surface water penetrated the site over a certain period of time.

"The Department of Energy is quietly attempting to lower the bar for bringing nuclear waste to Nevada," said Reid, who also is the ranking Democrat on the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds the DOE.

The Energy Department had no immediate response to Reid's letter, a spokeswoman at headquarters in Washington said Wednesday.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said it was "another attempt by the Department of Energy to make a square peg fit in a round hole.

"Yucca Mountain is not every going to meet the design requirements that were set out for a nuclear repository," Gibbons said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas.

"The DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are trying to change the rules and change the design so that Yucca Mountain fits. It's an attempt to bypass the safety requirements set out in law," he said.

Critics of the dump site testifying in Reno Wednesday directed their strongest criticism at the dangers of a spill if there a train wrecks while hauling waste to Nevada.

Hadder said as much as 70,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste could be sent to Nevada in up to 96,000 truck shipments and 20,000 rail shipments over a period of 24 to 39 years.