State estimate hikes nuclear shipments

Friday, July 30, 1999 | 11:19 a.m.

If Yucca Mountain opens as a high-level nuclear waste repository in the year 2010, a state transportation expert estimates 10 shipments of radioactive cargo a day could travel through Southern Nevada.

An earlier estimate used by the Department of Energy in technical studies put the radioactive shipments on the way to the mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, at around three a day.

The state's estimate forecasts three to seven truck shipments, one to two heavy haul loads and one rail cask a day for 30 years until a proposed repository is filled.

There is no railroad track to Yucca Mountain. The heavy haulers would transfer shipments from trains to the mountain from a remote site that has not been determined.

If the state is able to restrict shippers to certain days and times, the number of loads could increase each day.

However, no one will know the exact number of shipments for years, Nevada transportation consultant Robert Halstead said Thursday night. The DOE first has to determine if Yucca Mountain is safe and then decide on the transportation routes.

And the answers will not appear in a draft environmental impact statement being prepared by the DOE and awaited by state and local officials who will have six months to comment on the voluminous document once it's released later this month.

"The draft environmental impact statement may not help state and local officials to determine alternate routes to avoid dangerous two-lane rural roads and congested urban areas," Halstead said.

The Clark County Nuclear Waste Division hosted an open house Thursday at the county's Government Center that attracted 37 residents from all over the valley. Senior citizens who have retired to Las Vegas to young professionals arriving from the Midwest and East Coast studied maps and charts prepared by county planners.

Green Valley parent Caren Levenson got 400 other parents at Vandenberg Elementary School to write to the DOE, asking it to keep the waste shipments out of Henderson.

"It's so unfair," Levenson said of the plans to build the nation's only high-level nuclear waste repository in Southern Nevada's backyard.

"I want a future for my children in Southern Nevada," Levenson said of her first and third graders.

The county has had little chance to contribute to the DOE's draft statement, Nuclear Waste Division Director Dennis Bechtel said. That worries county officials, because they cannot plan for social and economic impacts.

The county plans to go to town board meetings and homeowners associations to help people understand the contents of the draft environmental impact statement, Bechtel said.

The county meetings will be in addition to 13 public hearings scheduled by the DOE.

The all-day DOE sessions will be held in Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Georgia and Washington, D.C. The Las Vegas session is set for Sept. 9 at the Grant Sawyer State Building.

While people are concerned for their health and safety, they also ask the county about economic impacts, the county's Assistant Nuclear Waste Division Director Russell DeBartolo said.

People are worried about a nuclear repository lowering property values, DeBartolo said.