DOE plan for Yucca would shift public land

Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1999 | 11:19 a.m.

AMARGOSA VALLEY -- The Department of Energy plans to remove 230 square miles of land from public use, including the northern part of the town of Amargosa Valley, if a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository is built at Yucca Mountain.

The land shift, part of the DOE's strategic plan for the repository, came to light Monday during the first public hearing on the draft environmental impact statement on Yucca Mountain, held in this rural town 12 miles downstream from the proposed repository.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, covers 2 square miles.

But even with the federal government taking responsibility for such a wide swath of land around the repository, it won't be enough of a buffer, said Les Bradshaw, manager of the Nye County Natural Resources and Federal Facilities Program, one of the local agencies overseeing the project.

"Once this material arrives, we will have it here forever," he told DOE officials who were hearing comments on the Yucca Mountain plan. "Who will bear the stigma of this program forever?

"Radiation will travel underneath the Amargosa Valley Community Center where you are sitting," he said, pointing to the floor of the center where 25 people gathered for the hearing.

Congressional approval would be needed to move the land from the control of the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Air Force to the DOE. None of the land is privately held.

The DOE was ordered by Congress in 1987 to study Yucca Mountain as the only site for a national high-level nuclear waste repository. Up to 70,000 tons of spent radioactive fuel from the nation's nuclear power plants would be shipped to the mountain, made of volcanic ash layers, by 2010 if the repository passes scientific muster.

Most of the people who commented on the 1,400-page DOE statement Monday had not read it through. But that did not stop them from tearing into the $27 million document on Yucca Mountain, just uphill from this farming community of 1,500 residents.

Chief among the critics Monday was Robert Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, which is providing state oversight for the repository. Gov. Kenny Guinn has asked the agency to review and provide written comments on the DOE's plan by the Feb. 9 deadline.

"How much? How fast? How far?" Loux asked.

None of those questions are answered by the DOE in its environmental study, making the document a target ripe for legal action, an agency spokeswoman who read Loux's statement said after Monday's hearing, the first of 17 across the nation.

Unlike most environmental impact statements, which evaluate many alternatives, the Yucca Mountain study by order of Congress considers only two options: building a nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain or doing nothing. That makes the proposed repository "not only unreasonable and unsafe, but also unlawful," Loux said.

While the original plan was to have the mountain's rock and specially made containers keep radioactivity from the surrounding environment, the DOE now admits that the repository will leak radiation, though by the DOE's calculations it will be a small amount that will not endanger health.

"The project is a planned leakage program," Nye County's Bradshaw said.

Not only did that leakage come under fire Monday night, but local officials challenged the DOE's measurement of radiation that will go into the mountain, using the scientific language of the report.

The DOE estimates the nuclear waste will stuff the mountain with some 4 billion curies of radiation. In contrast, the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident released 15 curies of radiation.

Bradshaw said according to scientists hired by the county, a total of 14 billion curies would go into the mountain. DOE's scientists got out their calculators and two of them spent almost an hour refiguring their number. They found they had left out a potential 11 billion curies of radiation, because they had neglected to include a few radioactive elements in the document.

But the debate was not limited to science.

Amargosa Valley, nestled at the entrance to Death Valley, captures water streaming from Lathrop Wells, a volcano field that formed Yucca Mountain about 12 million years ago. The town didn't have electricity until the mid-1960s and people have raised children, cotton, cows, pistachios and melons here since the turn of the century, alfalfa farmer LaVonne Selbach said.

The concerns of those farmers are more practical.

Ed Goedhart manages the Ponderosa Dairy, milking 5,000 cows twice a day and supplying organic milk to 30 million people in California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Washington state every day. Three years ago he took over the $40 million dairy, about 15 miles downstream of Yucca Mountain's ground water.

"It would be a disaster, a direct link with contaminated milk to 30 million people," Goedhart said. "The impact is as large as irradiating downtown Los Angeles."

While not concerned about an immediate risk, Goedhart wonders who would want to buy organic milk that had been contaminated with radiation.

Pistachio farmer Ralph McCracken said his well water runs on average 70 degrees Fahrenheit. "That's warm," he said. "In a nutshell, what you're offering us here are leaky containers in a leaky mountain in a bad setting."

And other concerns were cultural and spiritual.

Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney urged Amargosa Valley residents to challenge the DOE. "When are we as a people going to wake up to the fact the DOE is telling us a lie?" he asked.

When the Shoshone came to Southern Nevada about 5,000 years ago, the ground water was pure, Harney said, adding "now we buy our water from Safeway."

But not all the comments contained such negativity.

Paul and Patricia McKinney are in favor of building a repository at Yucca Mountain to solve a national problem, the only ones to speak in favor of the project Monday.

Paul has worked at the Nevada Test Site, where more than 900 nuclear weapons have been exploded above and below ground since 1964. They see it as the solution to a national problem created by nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.

"Can't you get an advertisement out to change their stupid minds?" Patricia McKinney said.