Sunday, April 25, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

YUCCA MOUNTAIN RAIL LINE: Residents oppose route

Most see effort to grab swath of land latest in long line of government abuses

Photos by Cariño Casas. Rancher Gracian Uhalde carries a stray ewe on his back in early April after it had wandered off with some cattle on the open range. Uhalde fears a rail line for nuclear waste would ruin his ranching operation in Lincoln and Nye counties if the Department of Energy proceeds with plans to build it. The remains of a stone cabin sit near a wooden cabin off the road to Reveille, a mining camp where Giovanni Fallini, the grandfather of Joe Fallini Jr., once lived. The valley in the distance is where the Department of Energy wants to build a rail line to haul nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. Sue Fallini, foreground, points to the Caliente rail corridor map during a discussion this month with her daughter Anna, left, and husband, Joe, at their Twin Springs Ranch. Sculptor Michael Heizer gestures during an interview this month about the government's plans for a nuclear railroad that he says will disrupt the rural Lincoln County setting behind him. Caliente Mayor Kevin Phillips discusses the Energy Department's plans for a rail line to Yucca Mountain while standing on a caboose on display this month near Union Pacific tracks. Railroad tracks have been part of the town since 1900. Behind Phillips is the train depot built in 1923 that now houses local government offices. Click image for enlargement.

RACHEL

Across an expanse of rocky peaks and sage-filled valleys, ranchers and others who thrive on this remote landscape fear the day when the much-ballyhooed, radioactive "glow train," as they call it, comes rumbling over the ridge.

It's a day that state officials who are battling the federal decision to build a 319-mile-long railroad to haul nuclear waste from the outskirts of Caliente to a yet-to-be-built repository at Yucca Mountain say might never happen.

They say the Department of Energy has underestimated the construction task, failed to do necessary field work on the environmental impact and miscalculated the cost by $1 billion, more than double DOE's estimate.

That does nothing, for the moment, to ease the anxiety of the ranchers and other high desert folk in this area who know what it's like to be at odds with the federal government. While they persevere, they have the scars to show for it. Some developed cancers as the result of above-ground nuclear blasts in the 1950s and 1960s. Others have seen land that belonged to their ancestors dwindle over the decades. Some just want to be left alone.

And the federal government isn't their only worry. Some rural residents think that officials in Lincoln and Nye counties are knuckling under to the project, which has the prospect to boost the local economies.

In short, sheep rancher Gracian Uhalde, artist Michael Heizer, cattleman Joe Fallini Jr., Western Shoshone Ian Zabarte and their neighbors in between think the government's grandiose plan to withdraw land for the rail line will forever change their lives, which are deeply rooted in this swath of undeveloped land.

"I don't know if I'm more skeptical about things nuclear or more skeptical about the government," said Uhalde, 51, driving his diesel Dodge Ram one April day with his border collie, Pookie, perched on a box in the back.

"They don't want to deal with the human issue," he said.

For him, his sons and daughter, their sheep-ranching heritage, which dates back to his grandfather's arrival in Lincoln County in the 1880s, will vanish if a railroad bisects his grazing allotments. This would be more devastating, he said, than the Cold War problems his family has endured for more than five decades with the nation's nuclear weapons testing grounds within earshot of his Cherry Creek ranch in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

Long past are the days when atmospheric nuclear bomb blasts at the Nevada Test Site sent pink clouds over his home, laden with radioactive dust particles that "were falling like snow," he said. Tumors that he and his sister developed as a result qualified them for $50,000 from the government in downwinders' compensation.

A rail corridor would split his long-held allotments, perhaps separating them by fences, which would disrupt the free-roaming range and restrict where livestock graze. Without fencing, his herds would be jeopardized by the danger of trains rolling through the range, particularly at night.

The area affected by the proposed rail corridor is within a couple hours drive north of this mobile-home hamlet best-known for the government's classified Area 51 installation that lies behind ridges to the south along Groom dry lake.

Given the remoteness of this range in the Coal and Garden valleys, Uhalde knows firsthand how vulnerable an unguarded railroad shuttling car after car of spent nuclear fuel would be to sabotage.

"With this terrorist stuff in Madrid, these rails become soft targets," he said referring to the March 11 train bombings in Spain that killed 191 people.

"My question is, why mess up our valley?" Uhalde said. "Leave us alone. You've done enough to us in the past."

Heizer, 59, a world-renowned artist whose works include sculptures and fountains in New York, Boston, Houston, Seattle and Nevada, toils in obscurity on private land that is far removed and off-limits to the public.

"My objection to having a radioactive train out here is the same: I live here," he said.

Since 1970, while raising cows and growing hay, he has worked on a project he intends to call "City," that's tied to the area's scenic, remote setting. A railroad, especially one for hauling nuclear waste casks just three miles away, would bring development to the area and ruin the natural setting, something he's strived to protect for both the environment and his privacy. "A lot of people might think this a big, desolate land, but it's highly productive and utilized," he said on a stormy afternoon while lightning bolted toward a ridge in the distance.

Among Heizer's concerns for the Yucca Mountain Project is the consolidation of a colossal amount of nuclear waste in a maze of tunnels in the volcanic-rock ridge 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. He brings up the same issues raised by state officials and scientists who question whether Yucca Mountain has the structural integrity to contain the waste for at least 10,000 years.

"If you put it in one place and something goes wrong, man-made or natural, the disaster would be of bigger proportion. Doesn't everybody think Yucca Mountain has unproven science?" he asked.

Robert Steele, a rancher who runs beef cattle in the corridor area, said he would be forced to relinquish his livelihood if the Caliente rail spur is built. The rail line would greatly diminish the range, the food source for his free-roaming cattle.

"It would put us out of business," said Steele, 40, of Alamo, who has twin, teenage sons who are rodeo cowboys.

"We're not doing it for the money. We're doing it for the love of cows, running cows and the lifestyle it brings," he said.

For Zabarte, the rail line would cut deep into his Western Shoshone heritage, slashing through the heart of Newe Sogobia, land of "Mother Earth" in the Mojave Desert that his tribe claims has never been relinquished.

"What we're dealing with is a living culture," he said. "Many people make the mistake in thinking this is foreign, in the past, and has no meaning and value except for a museum.

"I see my people hurt. It hurts me to see land destroyed," said Zabarte, who follows a Shoshone tradition of gathering sage on the range. "It affects me in ways that are hard to put in words."

Energy Department officials decided on the remote Caliente rail corridor because this last leg of the cross-country journey from reactor sites in the eastern United States, where most of the spent fuel is stored, would avoid the fast-growing Las Vegas Valley, 130 miles to the south.

The Caliente route, however, is not the most direct, least-expensive path to construct a railroad.

Instead of cutting across the secure and remote Nellis Air Force Range and the test site to reach Yucca Mountain adjacent the test site's southwestern edge, the department plans to haul most of the 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel and defense waste on a course skirting those areas.

That's because, officials say, a rail line with nuclear cargo or even general freight would interfere with air combat training missions and high-tech experiments on the Nellis range, posing safety and logistical issues.

Like the Uhalde family, the ranchers in the Fallini clan trace their roots here back more than a century. In the 1860s, Giovanni Fallini, a teenage immigrant from Italy was exploring the prospects for mining and ranching in south-central Nevada. He was a rancher whose sons worked for United Cattle and Packing Co. He was a friend and neighbor of a Shoshone named Reveille George at Reveille Mill, where silver and lead ore were ground up and the metals extracted for smelting.

From that and other land holdings sprung Twin Springs Ranch, a 45-minute drive northwest of here on state Route 375, the Extraterrestrial Highway. The ranch is the hub of surrounding grazing allotments that his grandson Joe Fallini Jr. inherited. The spread, with water rights, covers 663,000 acres where 2,144 cattle roam.

With Joe and Sue Fallini's daughter, Anna, 27, living at Twin Springs, the ranch has been in the family for four generations. Like the Uhaldes, they too endured the days of atmospheric nuclear testing. The fallout problem at the Fallini ranch was featured in a 1957 edition of Life magazine.

Joe Fallini said his cousin died of leukemia at age 11 from fallout that showered the area.

"All our dogs died with big cancers all over them," he recalled. "My dad and mother were smart enough they wouldn't let us go out when the radiation was real, real bad."

Now they're concerned a rail line running over their allotments would end what has taken more than a century to establish.

"It takes 130 years to put a ranch like this together and it takes one stroke of the bureaucratic pen to wipe it out," said Joe Fallini, 62.

A fire extinguisher labeled, "BLM Repellent" is within an arm's reach of his desk. It's symbolic of the Fallinis' decades of wranglings with the Bureau of Land Management over the water-based allotments. After Joe Fallini's father died in 1979 followed by his mother's death 10 years later, the Fallinis spent 14 years paying off the estate tax, interest and related costs, the biggest fraction of which was about $1.2 million assessed for the BLM grazing privilege.

They say the rail corridor, like connecting dots, would go right through the middle of their water developments.

"We're thinking it's no coincidence," said Anna Fallini, the youngest of three sisters.

She said there are other, more direct courses the corridor could follow but the one chosen by the Department of Energy sometimes coincides with wells and springs. In some places the corridor is about 4 miles wide, according to a map by a DOE contractor that was the basis for the one published in the Yucca Mountain Project's final impact statement.

Sue Fallini said, "We're going to end up in the courts over this. ... Regardless of whether they put a railroad in or not, once they withdraw this land, we're never going to get it back."

The federal government will have a difficult time prying water rights away from ranchers without paying a price for them, according to Karen Budd-Falen, a Wyoming attorney who specializes in grazing and property rights issues.

"One of the things I would argue is that water in Nevada is a private property interest and the government cannot take ownership of this private property without due process and compensation," Budd-Falen said Thursday.

But rangeland reform regulations passed during the Clinton administration could complicate the Fallinis' situation if the family is required to relocate water developments. If that happens, the BLM could assert joint ownership of any water improvements the Fallinis would make to sustain their livestock.

Asked about some of the rural residents' concerns, an Energy Department spokesman had no immediate answers.

"That's what we want to hear," said Allen Benson, a spokesman for department's Office of Repository Development in Las Vegas.

"Those are the type of questions we want raised. That way, when we write the environmental impact statement, we'll address them," he said.

Uhalde and others said they've received overwhelming support from Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the state's congressional delegation to oppose the Yucca Mountain transportation project. But Uhalde said he's not at all pleased with elected officials on the county level.

"I can't tell you how disgusted I am with Nye County and Lincoln County," he said. "They just rolled over and put their legs up in the air."

The stronghold of support in Lincoln County for the rail project revolves around Caliente Mayor Kevin Phillips, co-chairman of what's called the Joint City-County Impact Alleviation Committee. The eight-member board intends to work with the Department of Energy to ease the impacts of the rail line on local services and parlay the project into economic development.

Phillips says the town's 1,200 residents and some 4,000 in Lincoln County stand to benefit if local governments work with the federal government.

He explained his position while sitting on the steps of a caboose on display not far from the Union Pacific Depot built in 1923 that houses local government offices along railroad tracks that have been part of the town since 1900.

"I'm supportive of the rail corridor because, A, it's a reality and always has been; B, because of economic development; and C, because mostly I've studied and found out it can be managed safely, wisely and hopefully advantageously," Phillips said.

Phillips said he knows why ranchers are upset. "They don't want to be bothered. I don't blame them."

If the rail line is built, Phillips said, he hopes it will be used to ship other types of freight such as minerals and hay. Until it is built some six years after the repository is scheduled to open in 2010, he envisions small casks of spent fuel on rail cars will be off-loaded outside Caliente and hauled by legal-weight trucks to Yucca Mountain.