More scenarios of terrorism and nuclear waste

Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003 | 8:46 a.m.

In your Aug. 19 editorial, "Nuke reports serve only as a pacifier," you stated that several destructive scenarios haven't even been tested, yet the federal government is saying that transportation of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain will be safe.

Absent from your editorial was any mention of another obvious destructive scenario -- the car, van or truck bomb.

Ask the people of Oklahoma City if a van packed with common fertilizer and fuel could be detonated alongside something like a concrete structure, truck trailer or rail car. Ask if the resulting blast could be devastating. Ask the survivors of the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building if it is possible to unleash unfathomable, diabolical wrath upon innocent people using something besides missiles and airliners, which you mentioned. Ask the families of the 168 people who were killed in the blast if it is possible to vaporize something as solid as a building, truck or rail car. Ask them if it could happen.

Then ask yourself if transporting nuclear waste over our highways and rail lines is really as safe as its proponents are telling us it is. Let alone al-Qaida; nuclear waste rolling through our cities and towns is not even safe from our home-grown terrorists. Maybe it would have been safe in 1957, but not post Sept. 11.

As the tears well up in my eyes thinking about those innocents lost to terrorism, I must ask: Can history be repeated? Will we allow it to be?

WILLIAM SIMMONS Holladay, Utah