Friday, April 9, 2004 | 11:10 a.m.
CALIENTE -- As Laird Whipple works the latest in a chain of cigarettes, he pats his herding dog George and guns his pickup truck over the coarse brush of the Meadow Valley.
A veteran passenger, the contented mutt leans toward the car's cool air vent while Whipple boasts about his land, which stretches over the rolling, high-desert hills for thousands of empty acres.
"I know it doesn't mean very much to a lot of people, but it does to us," said the 66-year-old Whipple, who has a permit to run cattle on federal land. "We're real emotional about it. We're watching the federal government wipe us off anytime it wants to."
The Energy Department announced this week that it plans to build a railroad through Nevada to transport nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. The railroad will begin in Caliente and carve through 318 miles of mostly federal land, some of it used by ranchers for grazing and watering.
The state's leaders are united against Yucca Mountain, but the feelings aren't as clear in Lincoln County -- politicians dream of new jobs created by the railroad project, ranchers worry about their land and the rest of the residents either don't care or don't have the will to battle the government.
The Energy Department plans to ship 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, and if the railroad is built, the majority of that waste will go through Lincoln County.
While residents in Southern Nevada and around the state argue against Yucca Mountain, which is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, in part because of the danger of transporting the radioactive waste, many Lincoln County residents are unfazed by the danger. Their concern lies closer to home.
The ranchers will feel the most immediate effect as the government plans to cut a mile-wide swath through the county, dividing miles of grazing land.
"It takes years and years to build these ranches, and with one stroke of a bureaucrat's pen, they're gone," said fourth-generation rancher Joe Fellini, who would lose up to 130 square miles of grazing land to the railroad while it is studied and constructed.
"Hell, we've been here 130 years."
The Energy Department estimates that it will take almost four years to construct the rail line. Ultimately, the rail will be about 100 feet wide, according to the federal plan, but the Fellinis said they don't expect to get back any land that is taken away from them.
"I guarantee you, what the government takes away, the government never gives back," said Susan Fellini, Joe's wife.
A sign on the front door of the Fellinis' two-story home reads, "Absolutely no bureaucrats."
Ranchers have found few allies among their political leaders. In Lincoln County, four of the five commissioners openly support the proposed railroad, as does Caliente's mayor, Kevin Phillips.
"I've always supported reality," said Phillips, who said he has traveled to Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington state to see how nuclear waste is stored. He is convinced that the nation needs one central storage area.
Phillips has been planning for Caliente to be a pass-through point for nuclear waste since he became mayor 12 years ago. A Lincoln County task force, which Phillips is on, has been studying the impacts of the Yucca Mountain project on the region using federal funds.
There's no promise of how many jobs the Yucca Mountain railroad would create in Lincoln County or what the financial impact would be.
County Commissioner Hal Keaton said that it would be minimal and that the job growth would be temporary during the railroad construction.
"Once that's over, it's over," he said. "There's no more economic benefit."
The plan formally announced Thursday calls for an $880 million railroad from Caliente to Yucca Mountain. Trains protected by armed guards would transport up to two loads a day of nuclear waste casks coming in from 77 sites around the country.
Critics argue that the railroad never will be built for financial reasons.
"It's too expensive," said Bob Loux, the director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects. "It will cost well in excess of what the DOE (Energy Department) is projecting."
Yet the department argues for the train route because trains are safer. Trains aren't as susceptible to accidents and workers transporting the waste would be exposed to less radiation, according to federal estimates.
Still, some in the area, especially the ranchers, would prefer that trucks carry the waste. Even Phillips said he knows plenty of truckers who would welcome the opportunity to run loads of nuclear waste from Caliente to Yucca Mountain.
It's a short enough trip that, he said, a trucker could pick up a load, drop it off and make it back to Caliente in time for dinner with his family.
"They're champing at the bit," he said. "Boy, they want to drive."
Yet Phillips said he looks forward to having a railroad built that could bring in other business beyond nuclear transport -- almost like decades ago, when Caliente was a major rail stop.
"We're looking beyond 30 years," he said. "This is a great place to live, if you can figure out how to eat."
In its heyday in the 1950s, Caliente sported 11 railroad tracks and 13 bars.
Many of those storefronts are now closed. On the road to Caliente, drivers meet with one scenic vista after another as flat yellow valleys meld into rugged mountains.
But these days the beauty attracts more retirees than youngsters. There are few job opportunities today for the roughly 1,000 people who live in Caliente, though the town still sits along a major Union Pacific railroad line.
Caliente, though, isn't a stopping point -- the railroad ships freight on the line that curves south to Las Vegas and on to Los Angeles.
"Some nights, it's one (train) after another, that's what I like about this town," said 68-year-old Darlene Pete Harrington, whose family has lived near Caliente for generations. "When I was a little girl, you could hear the steam engines whistle."
County leaders see most Lincoln County residents as indifferent -- or resigned -- to their fate as a stop on the nuclear line. There's a distrust of the government, and several people said they stopped trying to fight it decades ago, when the government detonated nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site.
"We're downwinders," said Whipple, noting the area was in the path of the radiation that drifted east after the above-ground nuclear tests.
For a few years during the testing the government gave his family and others in Lincoln County dosimeters to detect radiation. He said he was given one to put on his eldest son's crib.
Now the problem is what Whipple, a Lincoln County native, sees as a government land grab.
Carla Harrington, a 48-year-old Caliente resident, said she doesn't keep up on the project because "they're going to do what they're going to do, regardless."
Thirty-year resident Dorothy Fruend, 66, said she's "not really thrilled" about the railroad, but there wasn't much she could do to protest it.
"What can a person do?" she said. "You can talk all you want and stand up at meetings all you want, but whatever's going to happen is going to happen."
Thus, ranchers said, they are left to make their own argument. They have a tough battle ahead -- they are fighting for rights to land that they don't own.
Almost 90 percent of the land in Nevada is federally owned. Most ranchers buy what little private land they can and obtain a permit from the federal government to graze on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management.
They don't own the land, but they must keep it up and they pay taxes on it.
Ranchers such as Whipple and Fellini have paid tens of thousands of dollars to drill wells and run miles of pipe through the BLM land. They also maintain the fences along the land.
And ranchers argue that the Bureau of Land Management hasn't even sent out notices to ranchers that they might lose access to the land.
Dennis Samuelson, a realty specialist for the BLM, said that reports of which sections will be affected have been published online and in newspapers. The bureau is still working with the Energy Department to answer the ranchers' questions, he said.
"They're all good points," he said. "Is this entire rail line going to be fenced on both sides? Where will there be crossings, not only for cattle but for the public? We're going to be a cooperating agency with them."
Yet ranchers say there's no real way to mitigate the impact on their cattle. Whipple said he would need 16 cattle crossings under the railroad to be able to maintain his ranch.
His ranch runs 6,300 cattle on tens of thousands of acres -- he can quickly add up 30,000 acres but says there are many more. He says his ranch is one of the few places in the state where cows can graze year-round.
Fellini has about 2,000 cattle on a ranch that runs more than 660,000 acres. He said the proposed railroad route goes over several of his wells and pipes that he paid to construct. It's also over some of his best grazing land, he said.
"We're going to fight like hell, because this is my whole life, this is what I came home for," said Fellini's 27-year-old daughter, Anna, who returned home to help with the ranch after she obtained a degree in engineering at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.
Fellini, who is known as a scrapper among local ranchers, has filed more than 30 lawsuits against the federal government over water and grazing rights. The Fellini ranch is desolate -- about 50 miles northwest of Rachel, a tiny town known for its proximity to top secret government installation Area 51.
The ranch is so large that Anna and Joe, both pilots, often fly to spot stray cattle. Sometimes, Joe flies over their land while Anna leans over to shoot coyotes on the ground.
Anna and her two grown sisters all hoped to keep the family tradition of ranching.
"It's not about money," Anna Fellini said. "It's about tradition and lifestyle."
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