Wednesday, July 18, 2001 | 10:57 a.m.
If a high-level nuclear waste dump is built at Yucca Mountain, Clark County would have to spend more than $1 billion to train emergency crews to respond to a possible accident, a new report says.
An accident, if it happened, would cost the county $1.4 billion per square mile to clean up. Residents near transportation routes could suffer $2.5 billion in property losses. Resorts could lose 10 percent to 20 percent of their visitors.
The Clark County Commission heard those figures Tuesday in the first in a series of reports on how the proposed nuke dump, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would affect the county's 1.4 million residents. The reports were prepared for the county by Urban Environmental Research, a Scottsdale, Ariz., consulting company.
What the consultants could not answer is where the county would find that money. The state has refused to negotiate with the federal government for benefits, because to do so would negate its right to challenge the project.
But without federal aid, the pricetag for preparing emergency responders could fall on county taxpayers. The county's entire budget for the current fiscal year is about $3 billion.
"Who gets cut?" Urban Environmental Research principal planner Sheila Conway asked. "Is it social services, such as welfare? Or schools?"
Yucca Mountain is the only site under study by the Department of Energy for burying 77,000 tons of highly radioactive wastes from commercial reactors and defense activities. The Department of Energy has spent $7 billion over 20 years studying the site and would build the repository if it is approved.
The cost of preparing police, firefighters and Nevada Highway Patrol troopers does not include upgrading hospitals and clinics to receive and treat victims contaminated with radiation.
If an accident occurred that leaked radiation from a shipping cask, the Department of Energy has estimated that it would cost $1.4 billion a square mile to clean up the damage from such an accident.
Even if the federal government promised to help pay those costs, the county's study noted that the DOE has a "consistent track record of not living up to its agreements with states and local governments, even court-ordered written agreements," Conway said.
The research group visited New Mexico, where the DOE operates the $1.8 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Project, a site accepting plutonium-laced wastes from the Defense Department. About 850,000 containers are to be buried in the salt caverns near Carlsbad over the next 35 years.
Since 1998, when the dump opened, New Mexico has received $20 million a year in federal funding, but it would not have received that if Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., had not had the political clout to secure the funding in Congress, Conway said. The money primarily covers repair to roads damaged by shipments, but no bypass routes have been built.
The Urban Environmental Research group used the New Mexico project to estimate costs for Clark County and Southern Nevada cities. In the coming year the company will analyze the effects of radioactive accidents on property values of major Strip hotels, shopping centers and cities from Las Vegas to Mesquite.
However, the report addressed how resort business could be affected. Resort owners told researchers they expected visitor losses of 10 percent to 20 percent because of bad publicity if an accident occurred.
That large a drop could "devastate" their properties because of high fixed costs, the report said.
One casino noted that it lost 25 percent to 33 percent of its business after part of its roof collapsed during a July 1999 flash flood.
Hotel owners also told researchers that while they have evacuation plans, those contingencies would not work in a radioactive accident.
Within a 3-mile radius, 28,000 people would need to be removed from the path of a radioactive plume during a daytime accident and 24,000 at night, the study said.
During a fire, earthquake or other emergency, those people would need to be moved just outside the hotel. In a radioactive emergency, they must be moved to a nonradioactive shelter, which could be miles away.
The Las Vegas Strip and downtown resorts lie along the DOE's proposed transportation routes.
The county study also estimated value losses to residences, small commercial properties and industrial warehouses along the transportation routes.
Between 50,000 to 100,000 truckloads are expected over 24 years at Yucca Mountain, according to the DOE, which has not chosen a repository design. That averages to between five and 10 nuclear waste trips a day through Clark County.
The western and northern sections of the Beltway cannot be used to transport nuclear waste, because they do not meet federal interstate safety standards. Nuclear waste truck shipments would have to use Interstate 15 and U.S. 95 until 2025.
There are no practical alternate routes for trucks coming from Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Phoenix or Reno.
The appraised properties with the most to lose are within one mile of I-15, according to 14 of 17 local banks and certified appraisers interviewed for the study. In the worst likely accident that spilled radioactive wastes, residential property losses would reach $1.5 billion.
Along the Las Vegas Beltway, $961 million in residential property would be lost in the worst-case accident. The consultants used DOE accident scenarios, but upgraded population figures using the 2000 Census. DOE estimates used 1990 Census figures.
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