County’s nuke waste watchdog leaving public service

Friday, June 29, 2001 | 10:30 a.m.

After 30 years doing everything from defending the Las Vegas Wash to managing Clark County's nuclear waste program, Dennis Bechtel leaves government service today and said he plans to return to school.

The 57-year-old Bechtel, director of the county's Nuclear Waste Division for 13 years, said he has accomplished what he set out to do: raise the credibility of such local issues as nuclear waste to a national scale.

The Las Vegas Valley may be 90 miles away from a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, but people are afraid of a permanent burial ground that close to home, Bechtel said.

Congress selected Yucca Mountain as the only site for the Energy Department to study in 1987. It has cost ratepayers and taxpayers $7 billion so far. Waste is not expected to arrive, if scientists find the mountain sound, until 2010.

Yet people from across the country are concerned about five truckloads per day carrying 77,000 tons of commercial spent fuel and military wastes rumbling through Southern Nevada for 24 years, Bechtel said.

"We've had people calling our office and saying they will not move here because of nuclear waste," Bechtel said. And the irony of it is, the Department of Energy has not recommended the site yet.

Bechtel said he has been committed to break bureaucratic walls down so technical people listen to the public's fears.

"If we can chip away at that, we can break down some of those barriers and get them to understand how the public feels," he said.

"When I first started, there was no acknowledgement of effects on the community from a project like Yucca Mountain," Bechtel said of the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "They thought Las Vegas is 90 miles away (from Yucca Mountain) so what's the big deal?"

When he joined the county Comprehensive Planning Division in 1980, Bechtel put his environmental background with the Aluminum Company of America of Cleveland to good use. In Ohio, Bechtel worked to stop chemicals from polluting Lake Erie in the 60s.

One of his first duties with Clark County was working on the Las Vegas Wash, a 15-mile stretch of green marshes threatened by increasing growth and runoff from the valley. As Bechtel leaves, federal, state and local scientists are cooperating in studies of the water quality and the environment.