Councilman says Nevadans have paid their nuclear dues

Diana Sahagun

Thursday, Jan. 17, 2002 | 9:41 a.m.

Las Vegas Councilman Gary Reese offered a unique perspective to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham's decision to recommend Yucca Mountain as the burial ground for 77,000 tons of the nation's nuclear waste.

Reese, 61, who grew up downwind of the Nevada Test Site, gave an emotional speech during Wednesday's City Council meeting, offering support for Mayor Oscar Goodman, who will attend the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington next week.

Goodman hopes to bring the anti-Yucca message to more than 100 mayors whose cities are along routes that would be traversed by trucks transporting waste to the proposed repository.

Reese's family moved to Lincoln County when he was just 3 months old. Without the luxury of television, one family pastime involved watching the above-ground nuclear blasts at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

More than 1,000 above- and below-ground nuclear experiments were conducted at the site from 1951 until 1992.

When he was 8, Reese remembers getting up early in the morning with his family and watching the experiments, oblivious to the dangers.

"We would see a very bright red, yellow, blue flame come out of the sky, it was just awesome," Reese said. "You'd see the flame that would light up the sky, and then you would see this mushroom ... and just sprinkle out all over."

Afterward, his father would wash the windows of an old pickup, which had become coated with dust as a result of the testing. It looked like light snow.

"Nobody ever warned us ... that this could be dangerous to you," Reese said. "We always wondered why we got to watch it when the wind was blowing our way, not toward Las Vegas."

Reese graduated from Lincoln County High School in 1959 as part of a class of 26. Nine are now dead, seven from various forms of cancer.

Former President Clinton in 2000 signed an expanded radiation compensation bill to include more residents -- including those in Lincoln County -- who lived downwind of the Test Site.

A $50,000 check from the government did little to comfort his mother, who has struggled with breast cancer, or Reese's father, who died in 1993 from silicosis, a lung disease caused by exposure to dust.

Nor did compensation soothe his brother's pain after his wife died three years ago after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Neither did a check to the survivors of two of Reese's best friends, who died from pancreatic liver cancer.

"I don't want your grandkids or your great-grandkids receiving downwinder money," Reese said. "If they can tell us that it's safe 50 years from now ... then why do they have to transport it clear across the U.S.? Why don't they just dig a hole where it's created and bury it there?"