Editorial: Viewing Nevada as garbage pit

Monday, March 13, 2000 | 10:05 a.m.

For decades Nevada was the home for atomic weapons testing, both above ground and underground. Sadly, though, Nevada's willingness to do its part during the Cold War to aid U.S. national security unwittingly has contributed to an impression that this state is willing to allow its citizens to be put at risk and its environment destroyed.

The past two decades have witnessed a rush by private industry and government to send deadly garbage to Nevada. The most visible -- and dangerous -- effort has been the federal government's plans to build a repository at Yucca Mountain that would store 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. Nevada also was one of three states that had a dump for low-level radioactive waste.

Now US Ecology, a private company that operates a landfill near Beatty, wants to treat and bury here toxic sludge contaminated with mercury. The company's earlier effort to bring the toxic sludge here was blocked by state officials who deemed the concentrations of mercury too high. This is the same sludge, as Sun reporter Mary Manning reported Friday, that was returned to Taiwan after it was illegally dumped in Cambodia in 1999. Riots were set off in Cambodia when apparently two workers died from mercury poisoning.

Taiwan's toxic sludge isn't the only issue, however. Don't forget that it was also announced last week that the Department of Energy will be shipping low-level radioactive waste from its nuclear facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to the Nevada Test Site for its burial. This brought joy to DOE officials in Tennessee. "It took me two days just to stop dancing," Clayton Gist, DOE's team leader for waste management, told Scripps Howard News Service.

All of this is unsettling. Rather than take care of the mess they created, the inclination now is for states in this nation -- and now even nations around the globe -- to send their tainted garbage to Nevada. It is outrageous that the U.S. government would allow one of its states to be perpetually targeted for such deadly wastes. Even in a nation such as ours, which has some of the toughest environmental standards in the world, it is obvious we still have a long way to go in ensuring that a small state, such as Nevada, doesn't have to keep being the garbage pit for the world.