Yucca foes foresee potential for nuke disaster

Monday, Dec. 3, 2001 | 9:25 a.m.

All it would take is four terrorists and $10,000 worth of materials available at home improvement stores to attack and crack a single nuclear waste container heading to a Yucca Mountain repository, state and county opponents of Yucca Mountain said Saturday.

Terrorism "is a genuine threat," Clark County transportation planner Fred Dilger said, referring to the federal government's plan for a repository containing 77,000 tons of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The remarks were made during a public hearing at the Clark County Government Center on a newly released draft report by the county on assumed local consequences of a nuclear waste repository being opened at Yucca Mountain.

A chemical explosion could trigger a nuclear nightmare if it cracked open a container of nuclear waste anywhere on the way to a proposed repository, officials at the hearing said.

Dilger noted that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh showed in his 1995 attack on the Alfred Murrah Federal Building the ready availability of explosive materials.

The scenario of an attack on a nuclear waste shipment was in the draft report. The county has joined other public officials in Nevada to oppose the proposed dump.

"If there is a worst-case scenario," County Commissioner Myrna Williams said, "it could affect most of the West."

The county's effort was bolstered Friday by a federal report that raised serious questions on how soon a repository could open.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, in a draft report, said that the Department of Energy is not ready to build a Yucca Mountain repository.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham vowed on Friday that the DOE will continue its work at Yucca Mountain.

"It's incredible the DOE would recommend Yucca Mountain by the end of the year," Sen. Harry Reid. D-Nev., said, noting that an analysis by the state and county would add details to the GAO's report.

Using DOE computer models and facts taken from federal studies on Yucca Mountain, state and county officials are preparing a final report by January, Dilger said.

Nuclear waste shipments are easy to spot for an attack, Dilger said. He cited a 1990 incident in which Chechen rebels seized a nuclear waste shipment. They tried but failed to turn it into a bomb in downtown Moscow.

Up to 12 truckloads of nuclear waste a day could travel Nevada's highways over the 30-year period it would take to fill a Yucca Mountain repository, Dilger said.

"We don't really know the route the DOE will use to transport nuclear waste, because they don't know themselves," Dilger said, noting the local studies use U.S. interstates and existing rail routes.

DOE officials who attended the hearing did not comment. In meetings over the summer on transportation to Yucca Mountain, the DOE has said that nuclear waste could be routed on a new railroad track around the Las Vegas Valley.

The latest estimates predict two transportation accidents a year with contamination at the surface of the shipping container, Dilger said.

The DOE estimates it could cost $1.4 billon to clean up a square mile of contaminated land within five miles of a radioactive accident.

If there were winds of between 10 and 35 mph, contamination could spread 20 to 40 miles, Dilger said.

To clean up the accident scene, officials would remove the people, tear down the homes and crate the rubble for burial. "You just tear the houses down, crate them and bury them," Dilger said.

The impacts the state and county experts calculated are consistent with other similar events studied by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, consultant Sheila Conway of Urban Environmental Research Inc., of Scottsdale, Ariz., said. The firm has been hired as a consultant to Clark County.