Jenna Morton, center, talks with others who attended Thursday night's Yucca Mountain scoping meeting at the Cashman Center. Morton is a board member of the environmental group, Citizen Alert. Photo by John Locher.

When Jenna Morton moved to Las Vegas from Chicago four years ago, she "was blissfully unaware" of the government's plans to put the nation's nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, even though much of what is destined to be entombed there will come from Illinois.

On Thursday, as a mother, resident, nightclub partner and board member of the environmental group, Citizen Alert, she went to the Cashman Center to see the Energy Department's exhibits on the nuclear disposal project and to express concerns about the dangers she sees in it.

"I feel like I have to listen to what they say and then ask more questions," Morton said before reading a statement to a court reporter at the department's second Nevada scoping meeting in as many days.

What she learned is that Yucca Mountain Project officials are relying in part on probabilities that an accident involving deadly, radioactive spent fuel assemblies encased in metal canisters won't happen along the transportation roads and railways, some that come within a half-mile of where her children go to school and her properties at the Palms.

"That probability is a science that deals with chance. There is always a chance," she said. "And a chance is always too much for me and my children."

In her written comment to Energy Department officials, she concluded: "So, in your EIS (environmental impact statement) if you find that my infant daughter Petra's health and well-being is being placed in one iota of jeopardy, you must come to the conclusion that this project is environmentally unsound and unacceptable."

Midway through the three-hour scoping meeting, 46 people had signed in to view posters and maps and hear 23 Energy Department and contractor personnel explain what they mean.

By the end of the meeting, project spokesman Allen Benson said eight had offered comments for the record, which is five less than those who gave statements to stenographers Wednesday night in Amargosa Valley, the community closest to Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The purpose of the scoping meetings was to get the public's assessment of what issues need to be addressed in impact statements that will be released next year for transport, aging and disposal canisters and the so-called Mina rail corridor. The corridor, being considered along with one from Caliente, would involve constructing a 300-mile rail line on an old rail bed approaching Yucca Mountain from the north.

Robert List, a Nuclear Energy Institute consultant and a former Nevada governor, described the Las Vegas scoping meeting as "a good healthy opportunity for people to come in and get a lot of detail."

"The whole purpose of these scoping meetings is to get suggestions and advice on what needs to be addressed in environmental impact statements," List said Thursday.

Jacob Paz, an industrial hygienist, wondered why project officials have not paid much attention to recent scientific reports on adverse consequences from the combined effects of nuclear waste and toxic metals that will be used as engineered barriers to try to contain the radioactive remnants hundreds of thousands of years in the future.

Paz said he also wonders what will happen to workers boring more than 50 miles of tunnels to entomb the waste in volcanic rock that has ingredients known to cause chronic and sometimes deadly lung ailments.

Irene Navis, planning manager for Clark County's Nuclear Waste Division, said the county could be saddled with a $3 billion bill to cover expenses for having emergency personnel on hand should an accident occur in one of the many thousands of shipments that would come to Nevada by roads and rails.

"It will cost us $385 million to get ready for the first shipment," Navis said.

Earlier, Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Shelley Berkley, both D-Nev., criticized the Bush administration for allowing the Yucca Mountain plans to proceed over the state's objections and despite questionable science they said President Bush ignored when he endorsed the project in 2002.

Berkley said the underlying purpose of the meetings is a "backhanded way" to make the planned, above-ground storage pads at Yucca Mountain an illegal interim storage site.

Reid said the "radioactive road show" was "an absolute waste of time."

"Nuclear waste will never be transported to Yucca Mountain. ... On-site storage is what will happen to all this nuclear waste for a number of reasons, not the least of which it is so much cheaper. Number two, it's so much safer."