Columnist Susan Snyder: More waste, courtesy of D.C.

Tuesday, April 30, 2002 | 8:30 a.m.

Brian O'Connell of the Nuclear Waste Program Office says the Las Vegas sisters who peddled lemonade and gave their allowances to fight the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository are wasting their hard-earned money.

"Most of their lemonade money is going to lawyers, (public relations) firms and media outlets outside the state," he wrote to me in a lengthy e-mail sent early Monday.

Well, Lilina and Analise Lucchese assured me they knew that their money would either help pay for television ads or lawyers for the court fight.

He says the girls are being swayed by one-sided reports such as those printed in the bad, old Las Vegas Sun, which he claims is only interested in printing half-truths in order to scare little girls. I would ask that he read the volumes of stories written over the past two years by Sun reporters Mary Manning, Benjamin Grove, Erin Neff and others. I'll not dignify the ridiculous accusation any further.

After 20 years of study and $4 billion, how they settled on a site 90 miles from the fastest-growing urban area of the nation is beyond the understanding of many adults, not just two little girls from the Las Vegas Valley. The folly of transporting this garbage across the country is the icing on this bitter cake.

If O'Connell is so passionate in his beliefs, why not ship the stuff through his grandmother's hometown and store it 90 miles from his house?

Actually, maybe he would agree to that. But we know of at least two little Las Vegas girls who don't share that value system.

Thank goodness for small favors.

It seems the playground bullies are alive and well and wearing suits in D.C. I can't imagine some guy is getting paid to send two pages of electronic vitriol belittling the efforts of two little girls on the other side of the country who exercised their freedom of speech through a lemonade stand.

You'd have to sell a lot of lemonade to scrape up $10,000, which is what a Minnesota woman paid for the Stillwater, Minn., cabin used in the movie "Fargo."

The 18-by-36-foot house was site of the movie's murder, which took place outside and involved a wood chipper.

It wasn't a real murder, after all, and the woman says the cabin was a bargain. It saved her the trouble of building one, and you can't build much for $10,000.

A story about the sale that appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune didn't say whether a wood chipper was part of the deal.

Hartford, Conn., residents need a nuclear waste dump if only for perspective.

Some have lost all good humor over the music from ice cream trucks. Some old crosspatch is leading the fight against a vendor whose truck plays such I-scream-you-scream classics as "Turkey in the Straw."

"Every night, it's the same songs over and over. It drives you crazy," the woman says in a news wire report.

We're dropping bombs and money into a black hole in the Middle East. We're bickering about transporting radioactive nuclear cross-county in much the same manner we ship boxes of soap. And for the first time in decades, the younger generation isn't likely to be as healthy physically or economically as their parents.

She's crazy, all right.