Residents urged to speak up on nukes

Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2000 | 10:31 a.m.

County Commissioner Myrna Williams urged Southern Nevada residents to tell the Department of Energy today that it has failed to consider local concerns such as radiation exposure from burying deadly nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain.

The DOE is conducting a daylong hearing at the Grant Sawyer State Building, Washington Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard North. The evening session begins at 6 p.m. when Gov. Kenny Guinn, congressional representatives and resort officials are expected to speak about their concerns for mixing nuclear waste burial with Nevada's tourist-based economy.

While many people believe Yucca is "a done deal," Williams said it has been public outrage over the past 15 years that has kept nuclear wastes out of Nevada. Nevada officials have kept Congress from approving temporary nuclear waste storage at the site for the past five years.

"We do not believe this is a done deal," Williams said of the federal plan to bury 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste inside Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It is the only site under study as a repository.

The mountain, riddled with earthquake faults and fractures that may help speed ground water through it, has not been selected as a repository that will have to last at least 10,000 years, Williams said. Scientific studies are ongoing.

Letting the DOE know about public concerns is "crucial" because the written comment period on environmental impacts closes Feb. 9, Williams said, and today's hearing is the last one in Nevada.

Williams is hopeful that the new DOE Yucca Mountain chief Ivan Itkin will listen to Nevadans. She has written countless letters on transportation issues relating to nuclear wastes and said that the DOE either failed to respond or took months to send a form letter in reply.

"This lack of response is only because we are considered a colony, not a state," she said. The federal government controls over 85 percent of Nevada.

"All we need is one accident involving nuclear waste," Williams said. "What do you think it will do to tourism? What do you think it will do to families living near there and the children in the 26 schools along the local routes?"

Public Citizen senior policy analyst Amy Shollenberger testified that the DOE should scrap its three-volume, 1,600-page environmental impact document and start over with current information on Las Vegas. About half of the Las Vegas population did not live here when the DOE wrote the document using 1990 statistics, she said.

"If DOE would draw an honest picture of the decision it has already made with regard to Yucca Mountain, this country would see that it is the wrong decision," Shollenberger said. Public Citizen is a consumer watchdog group started by Ralph Nader in 1971.

DOE's own estimates suggest that at least 50 accidents and as many as 310 accidents could occur during waste shipments over 24 years, Shollenberger said. In 1986 the DOE said that a severe accident in a rural area involving high-speed impact, lengthy fire and fuel escaping the container would contaminate a 42-square-mile area requiring 462 days and $620 million to clean up.

There are no preferred shipping routes and no preferred shipping methods presented by the DOE. Shollenberger said. "Those citizens have a right to be informed about the risks they will face from this nuclear waste shipping campaign," she said.

Nuclear cask designer Robert Jones said that the public should not worry about radioactive waste shipments to Yucca Mountain at all. "We've been doing it for 30 years without a problem," he said.

"We are not talking about a witch's brew," Jones said of the nuclear waste pellets packed into stainless steel drums for shipping. "We are not somehow throwing the dice. We've not had a failure."

Jones, a consultant to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of the nuclear industry, has been at work on waste packages for 30 years. He helped design the IF-300, a commercial rail cask.

Asked how much the institute pays him, NEI spokesman Steve Unglesbee refused to disclose Jones' fee. Jones has a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from San Jose State University and a masters in business administration from Santa Clara University, both California institutions.

"I make no bones about being pro-nuclear," Jones said. "I think that the DOE has bent over backwards to listen to public comments."