Author talks about background of nuke-waste thriller

Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2003 | 11:39 a.m.

"A Single Star," published in February, is a story about how South Carolina battles the federal government to keep plutonium shipments out after a fictional high-level radioactive waste spill in the town of Florence.

Barnett will be in Las Vegas Thursday to sign copies of the book at Barnes & Noble on West Charleston Boulevard.

As a young boy, he lived with his family in southern New Mexico from 1953 to 1962, part of an Air Force family who knew the history of the first atomic bomb blast in Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945.

Now a resident of South Carolina, Barnett became intrigued with nuclear transportation after he saw a newspaper photo of a train carrying plutonium rumbling straight through town in the middle of the night.

"I wondered what might happen if there was an accident," Barnett said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

In 1994 South Carolina sued the federal government twice and failed to stop shipments of plutonium from the former Soviet Union from arriving at an Energy Department facility in Savannah River, S.C., for storage.

Then-Gov. Jim Hodges went to court to try to halt the shipments, even threatening to lie down in the road and stop nuclear waste-bearing trucks.

The federal government prevailed. The plutonium was trucked to Savanna River without incident.

"The state, of course, lost," Barnett said. "The deck was stacked against the state when it came to nuclear issues."

An environmental lawyer, Barnett researched what would happen in the event of a spill. As Barnett pursued his research, he became more and more alarmed.

"What is in the casks, the spent fuel rods, is fairly horrible," Barnett said. "I was not an activist, but the research told me the consequences would be horrible."

He said a segment last month of CBS' "60 Minutes" that focused on the risks of shipping nuclear waste across the nation if a Yucca Mountain repository opens illustrated how dangerous it is.

"I couldn't believe the video of the transportation casks that were breached on the '60 Minutes' program," he said. "That was really shocking."

Through his research for the novel, he learned about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Barnett has worked as an environmental attorney for years, first for the Army Corps of Engineers and then with the Charleston, S.C., law firm of Smith, Bundy, Bybee and Barnett.

In the novel, havoc prevails after the fictional nuclear spill.

Describing how a person would die from radiation exposure was difficult, Barnett said, until he found details in a book translated from Russian about the gruesome deaths of three firefighters who braved the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986.

Barnett said he portrayed the people running the nuclear waste program as "particularly unscrupulous." They challenge the governor at every turn, until South Carolina legislators ponder seceding from the union.

The title of the book comes from the fact that each state in the union is represented by a star on the U.S. flag, Barnett said.