Editorial: Tragedy waiting to unfold

Thursday, July 13, 2000 | 9:03 a.m.

When it comes to plans to store high-level nuclear waste in Nevada, the debate centers on whether Yucca Mountain can safely store 77,000 tons of this poisonous garbage for the next 10,000 years. Unfortunately not enough attention is paid to the dangers of how man's deadliest waste would get here in the first place.

But a group of environmental activists, the Washington-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service, recently started its so-called "Radioactive Roads and Rails" tour, which is a bid to raise more awareness to the perils of transporting high-level nuclear waste across the nation. A truck, which will carry a mock 20-foot-by-8-foot nuclear waste cask, left Michigan on July 3 and will end its journey in Nevada sometime next month. The activists note that if Yucca Mountain is approved as a repository by the federal government, 100,000 shipments of waste from Department of Defense facilities or nuclear power plants would travel amid heavily populated areas, along routes which would be within one mile of as many as 50 million people. Whether by rail or road, the likelihood of a disastrous accident is all but certain with this many shipments.

The fact is more than just Nevada is in danger if a central repository for nuclear waste is given a green light by the Department of Energy and Congress. "The message is that when it comes to high-level nuclear waste, we all live in Nevada," activist Kevin Kamps told Sun reporter Benjamin Grove. This indeed is the dirty little secret that the nuclear power industry and its supporters in Congress don't want the public to know. It's to their advantage to omit the salient point of transportation when discussing nuclear waste storage. It's disturbing that instead of storing this waste at nuclear power plants until a safe technology can be found to render it less harmful, Congress is hell-bent on sending this waste to Nevada no matter what the dangers that both transportation and geologic storage pose.