Letter: Yucca Mountain bad security risk

Thursday, Feb. 28, 2002 | 9 a.m.

It struck me after reading Mike O'Callaghan's Feb. 21 column, "Mayor was on target," that perhaps Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham needs to study risk analysis to understand that six to seven canisters of nuclear waste per day for about 30 years, which comes to about 75,000 canisters, all going to one place via one access road, is a certainty for mishap.

Using past waste-shipment history, as homeland security director Tom Ridge did, to predict waste shipments to Yucca Mountain is not valid: Those shipments came from 106 facilities going to 72 storage areas using secret, random shipment schedules.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to get hold of waste going to Yucca Mountain.

If this waste issue is truly a matter of national security, I don't see how we can keep wastes safe by exposing them. It's sort of like not wanting to get wet but stepping out in the rain without an umbrella.

I enjoyed the column.

RON BOURGOIN Editor's note: The writer was the consultant to the town of Rolesville in Wake County, N.C., in 1984 when a site in that area was being considered by the Department of Energy as a potential high-level radioactive waste repository.