Hearing the truth about Yucca

Matt Huffman and Launce Rake

Sunday, Oct. 9, 2005 | 10:32 a.m.

If you want to know the truth about Yucca Mountain, the truth -- as any alien-hunting "X-Files" fan knows -- is out there.

Call a public hearing on Yucca Mountain, and you'll find the "truth" is sometimes way, way out there.

In a series of Environmental Protection Agency public hearings this week on radiation standards at Yucca Mountain, speakers invoked science, the law and even God in their arguments.

Sometimes they even spoke on topic.

Public hearings are not created by intelligent design; they often evolve. Given that humans are involved, that can mean many things.

The EPA set out to gather comment on a technical, serious issue. And early in the four days of hearings there were technical, serious comments.

But hold a Yucca Mountain meeting and your agenda doesn't mean a thing. People will be there to debate the issue of nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain and why the Red Sox lost in three straight. (There are bonus points if you can connect the three.)

Mickey Jay, a Las Vegas resident who said she represented the Tule Springs Preservation Committee, the Nevada Equestrian Safety Coalition and "future generations who are not here to speak for themselves," told the EPA that the dump was not a good idea.

"A single repository makes no sense," Jay said. She reiterated the points made by many before her, that transportation of the waste would be unsafe and that the nuclear waste generated by the country's reactors should stay where it is now.

"This can have untold effects on everybody, not just the West, the whole world," Jay said.

But not everyone lives in that world.

Fred Toomey, an 80-year-old ironworker who worked at the Nevada Test Site for three decades, called for more nuclear reactors to solve the energy crisis and scoffed at the alleged dangers of radiation.

"They're living, there's a big city right now where they blowed the atomic bomb up," he said, referring to the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only places, so far, bombed with nuclear weapons in wartime.

Richard DeKlever, a quality assurance engineer at the Nevada Test Site for most of the last 20 years, said he had no problems with the EPA's proposed standards.

Radiation, he said, has been good for him.

"Nuclear science enhances life," he said.

And it's the gift that keeps on giving.

DeKlever said the country needs not just one, but nine -- yes, nine -- nuclear waste dumps over the next century to hold the anticipated waste.

And don't tell anyone this, but John Snyder, an Ohio native, said he was on a secret mission to Nevada.

In front of God, man and -- perhaps more importantly -- the federal government, he said that people will soon have the technology to make radioactive waste safe.

Really?

"God has shown me this in visions," he said.

Snyder added that there has never been "a nuclear accident that killed hundreds or thousands of people."

He's technically right on that point -- the United Nations says 56 people were "directly" killed by the 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown, although over time it is expected to take 4,000 lives.

EPA officials politely said they were accustomed to comments that are not as, well, narrowly defined as the subjects of their hearings. "There are issues that people bring up that we don't have a role in," said the Environmental Protection Agency's Betsy Forinash. "But that doesn't mean the comments don't count.

"Every comment gets considered."

And that's the truth.