Anti-nuke groups make Yucca pitch

Friday, Oct. 19, 2001 | 9:29 a.m.

The public comment period on the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain ends at midnight, and a group of activists are in town to urge Department of Energy officials to dump the idea of transporting radioactive waste to Nevada.

National representatives for 36 anti-nuclear groups visited Las Vegas Thursday to stress why Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, should not serve as the only site for the disposal of 77,000 tons of the nation's nuclear waste.

Representatives for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability are saying that tens of thousands of residents from across the country would never allow high-level nuclear waste, stored at 103 commercial reactor sites and DOE facilities nationwide, to leave their respective states.

Prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, New Mexico since March 1999 had received 400 truckloads of waste that contained plutonium, said Don Hancock of the Southwest Research Center in Albuquerque, an independent nuclear watchdog group.

The DOE, which halted shipments to the New Mexico site after the attacks, opened the Waste Isolation Pilot Project for the purpose of burying plutonium from defense sites that had at one time been used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. However, the site could become the repository for the nation's nuclear waste should the Yucca Mountain project fall by the wayside, Hancock warned.

But that would take an act of Congress. In 1987 lawmakers singled out Yucca Mountain as the only site to be studied for the burial of the nation's high-level nuclear waste. The DOE has studied the site for 20 years, and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is expected to recommend the site to President Bush for approval by the end of the year.

As the comment period winds down, former U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan, who also served as Nevada's governor, will speak about the proposed nuclear waste repository during a town hall meeting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Bryan's presentation, part of UNLV's Yucca Mountain Education Project, is slated 6 to 8 p.m. in the Classroom Building Complex, Room A-106. Project Director Brad Eden said Bryan is speaking free of charge.

The DOE until midnight will accept public comment on the Yucca project at the Las Vegas Science Center at 4101-B Meadows Lane across the street from the Meadows Mall.