80,000 loads of nuke waste to travel near LV

Friday, Jan. 12, 2001 | 11:32 a.m.

Clark County planners estimate there will be at least 80,000 loads of deadly radioactive waste traveling through Las Vegas over a 24-year period to a Yucca Mountain nuclear repository.

That's almost double a federal estimate.

However, even if the Energy Department's figures are used, Clark County planner Fred Dilger says the Las Vegas Valley still faces a serious threat from the plan to bury 77,000 tons of commercial and defense nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Dilger made his comments during a meeting Thursday to organize a community effort to oppose the Yucca repository plan.

With the shift of political power in the White House, community leaders said they feared those truckloads of nuclear waste could arrive in Nevada sooner than 2010 when the DOE expects to open a dump at Yucca.

The statistics are chilling, Dilger said.

Eleven to 88 people living within one mile of an accident could die of cancer after being exposed to the worst release of radiation, the DOE projected in environmental studies.

All nuclear shipping routes travel across the country to Yucca Mountain. "We are truly at the end of the nuclear waste funnel," Dilger said of a DOE-generated map displayed during the meeting at the County Government Center.

If the DOE's projection is true, nuclear-ladened trucks would ship the waste to Yucca Mountain through cities such as Salt Lake City; Omaha, Neb.; St. Louis; Atlanta and Miami, Dilger said. The waste would also cross a total of 43 states. That estimate does not include Defense Department loads from nuclear weapons sites across the nation.

From 1964 to 1990, only 2,561 high-level nuclear waste shipments had been trucked around the country. "The DOE is proposing 19 times that number for Yucca Mountain," Dilger said.

At least three to five accidents involving the nuclear shipments will occur in Nevada over the 24-year period and cost $1.4 billion per square mile to clean up, he said. "That's right, $1.4 billion. You can't just wash it up or box it up and haul it away."

Because of radiation from cesium or plutonium, the contaminated site would have to be torn up, any buildings demolished and buried at a certified hazardous waste site.

"Imagine if you are trapped alongside one of those trucks in rush-hour traffic on the beltway or the expressway," Dilger said.

Based on federally approved highways, six nuclear waste trucks a day would enter Nevada from Utah northwest of Las Vegas along Interstate-15, transfer to the northern beltway then to U.S. 95 for the final leg to Yucca Mountain, Dilger said. An estimated 50,000 or more shipments would arrive along this route in the 24-year period.

A second route, also using I-15 from California, would connect with U.S. 95 and carry more than 20,000 shipments in that time frame.

Since the northern beltway will not be ready until at least 2025, many shipments starting in 2010 could pass near the Las Vegas Strip with its thousands of hotel rooms, Dilger said.