Letter: Nuclear industry must begin to act responsibly

Wednesday, March 7, 2001 | 9 a.m.

There should be no proliferation of the nuclear industry until the nuclear industry finds a safe way to take care of nuclear waste where it is generated. It is pure gall and dirty politics by Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska and former Sen. Bennett "Screw Nevada" Johnston of Louisiana, who now lobbies for the nuclear industry, just to name a few, to try to foist this on Nevada. Nevada has already done more than its share of nuclear testing of nuclear devices that caused serious health problems for its workers, neighboring Utah and innocent animals. Why don't they lobby for Alaska's vast uninhabited wasteland or Louisiana's vast underground salt domes to house this product?

Yucca Mountain is just 90 miles from Las Vegas and that mileage distance was cited long before we became the fastest growing area in the country. It has not yet been proven to be safe. And shipping this to Nevada against our wishes is only part of this dangerous plan.

The transportation of this deadly waste endangers the people of all the states the trucks would travel through. You just have to read the newspapers to know the many accidents that have occurred by carriers of deadly waste. Thousands of people have had to be evacuated for their safety. There is no safe way to transport this waste and there is no verifiable proof that the packaging is safe either. Just saying so is not enough. Erosion could be disastrous, and doing it sensibly would take a lot less than 10,000 years!

It is time that the corporate nuclear industry assumed responsibility for a problem that is theirs, not ours.

SYLVIA LAMPE GROSS