Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

YUCCA MOUNTAIN PROJECT: DOE takes comment on plan

Responses mixed on transportation of nuclear waste

Wayne Horlacher, right, and Ken MacDonald read a display about transporting nuclear materials Monday during a meeting on the Yucca Mountain Project at the Cashman Center. Photo by Craig L. Moran.

For the fifth time this month, Department of Energy officials on Monday brought out their maps and displays on how they plan to build a 319-mile railroad to haul nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.

This time, at the Cashman Center, more than 120 Las Vegas Valley residents and a few from outside Clark County had a chance to let DOE know what they think about the plan.

Some said they were not impressed. Others said the federal government was going about it backwards.

Several said they liked the idea and Nevadans stand to reap economic benefits.

Still others wondered what it would do to the local economy and whether the rail line and a repository, if built, will be safe.

"They're not even pretending any more that they care what we think," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, an environmental group. "We're protesting the whole process."

Maze Johnson said the scoping meetings DOE has held in Las Vegas, Reno, Caliente, Goldfield and Amargosa Valley were really open houses that didn't allow for the same information exchange that takes place at a public hearing.

As such, she said Citizen Alert will hold community meetings of its own at 6 p.m. today at the Senior Center in Caliente and again at the same time on May 27 in Pahrump.

Jeff van Ee, representing the Toiyabe Chapter of the Sierra Club, said he, too, is "deeply troubled by the process that has been used to select Yucca Mountain, evaluate the environmental impacts and restrict the consideration of alternatives."

In a written statement, he accused the DOE of skirting the National Environmental Policy Act by holding a meeting on what should be included in an impact statement for the Caliente rail line "before all of the science is in on Yucca Mountain and before the mountain is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

The DOE's meetings, he noted, took place after the agency selected the Caliente rail corridor and sought permission to withdraw that land from public use.

"They've got the cart before the horse," he said with wilderness advocate Susan Potts at his side.

Potts, Southern Nevada director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness, pointed to a map that shows the planned rail line running through wilderness study area. It will be illegal to allow railroad tracks to be installed in those areas without Congress releasing the land from its protected status, she said.

Then, there was John Baietti, 52, who runs a small business in the Las Vegas Valley and who spoke loud and clear against the Yucca Mountain opponents.

"We strongly believe that what they're saying is absolutely garbage," he said.

Baietti was referring to the concerns of environmentalists and the state's congressional delegation about the risks involved with hauling 77,000 tons of the nation's most potent nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.

"There is no risk. Absolutely none. Nada," he said. "Leaving it where it is now is insane."

Instead of opposing the nuclear waste project, Nevada should seek financial relief from the federal government, Baietti said.

But Robert Halstead, transportation consultant for the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, noted that although the rail line would run across the largely uninhabited terrain of the state's rural counties, up to 89 percent of the shipments would still come through downtown Las Vegas.

Cassandra Fletcher, a newcomer to Las Vegas, said she's trying to get a grasp on the issues from her perspective as an educator.

Fletcher said it is obvious that the federal government eventually will consolidate the nation's spent nuclear fuel at a repository at Yucca Mountain.

"We are going to have to face the reality that we are being railroaded here," she said.