Click image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson.

SILVER SPRINGS -- June Mick fled to this rural Lyon County community six months ago to get away from the crime and high costs of south Florida.

She and her husband paid $230,000 for a manufactured home and 4.7 acres of jackrabbits and sagebrush near an infrequently used railroad track about 40 miles east of Carson City. Only last week did Mick learn the track in her backyard is under study as the rail line on which Department of Energy trains would carry high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.

"I don't want that stuff," she said. "What if there is an accident? There is no telling what could happen."

Her thoughts are shared by neighbors a few blocks away. Retired Navy veteran Robert Brittain moved to his track-side Silver Springs home last year. Ruth Curtis purchased her mobile home beside the track 16 years ago.

"I'm pro-military. But I don't care for Yucca Mountain. Ammunition is different. It's for national security," Brittain said.

"Nuclear waste?" Curtis questioned, then answered herself: "Oh, no."

Ninety percent of homeowners interviewed last week in Silver Springs oppose the proposal to haul nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain through their inexpensive but rapidly growing community.

They've found peace and quiet in Silver Springs' wide-open spaces. They knew trains have occasionally carried bombs past their homes to the Army Ammunition Depot at Hawthorne since the 1930s.

But they were not aware that the DOE is looking at using the same tracks to carry waste to Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, from commercial nuclear power plants across the country.

State laws require county planning departments to notify homeowners when new developments are planned in their neighborhoods, but the federal government isn't obliged to notify people when it wants to haul radioactive waste through their backyards.

The DOE placed advertisements in the Fallon newspaper about a hearing last Wednesday at which residents could discuss the railroad plan, but in Silver Springs, news travels largely by word of mouth.

Whether hauling 77,000 tons of radioactive waste within a few yards of Silver Springs' bedrooms poses any danger depends on whom you ask.

Bob Loux, the executive director for the state Agency for Nuclear Projects, said a terrorist with a shoulder-held, anti-tank missile launcher could put a hole in a cask containing nuclear waste.

"If 1 percent of the cargo escaped, it would contaminate a 42 square-mile area and take a couple of decades and $8 billion to $10 billion to clean up," Loux said. "DOE maps have shown up on terrorist Web sites, we are told by the FBI."

It is not just Silver Springs residents who have reason for concern, he added. Trains from power plants will move along the main Union Pacific line paralleling Interstate 80 from the east and west. Nuclear waste would be hauled through downtown Reno, where a hearing on the rail line proposal has been scheduled for Nov. 27.

The nuclear trains would veer off the Union Pacific line north of Fallon and head more than 300 miles south to Yucca Mountain along a route near U.S. Highway 95 that goes through Silver Springs and close to the rural communities of Schurz, Hawthorne, Mina, Tonopah and Goldfield.

Costs of constructing this "Mina Corridor" route, including laying 209 miles of track from Hawthorne to Yucca Mountain, have been estimated at more than $1 billion.

Allen Benson, director of external affairs for the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, does not share Loux's alarm.

He noted the federal government has been hauling nuclear waste by truck for 50 years with no problems, including making more than 4,000 shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico.

"The safety record is quite remarkable," Benson said. "I am not aware of any release harmful to the public. We are quite confident."

Benson noted the waste going to Yucca Mountain would be in solid, not liquid, form. If a cask were penetrated, some pellets might fall onto the ground, but a hazardous materials team would be sent out "to clean it up and move on," he said.

Security officers will accompany the trains, according to Benson, and the DOE "is not going to advertise" when shipments will be moved to Yucca Mountain. He anticipates about two trains a week will haul waste over a 24-year period.

"There is no such thing as a 100 percent safety guarantee," Benson said. "But this is definitely not Chernobyl. People have this fear of nuclear. We understand that. But nuclear is medicine. Nuclear is electricity."

The public reaction to the word nuclear is far different further south in economically depressed rural Nevada. Of 25 people interviewed last week in Goldfield, Hawthorne, Tonopah, Schurz and Mina, 22 expressed support for the DOE's new rail line.

Hawthorne businessman Rex Mills epitomized their views during a hearing Tuesday in Hawthorne. He said rural Nevadans want the DOE to share its Yucca Mountain track with commercial trains.

"If they put the railroad here, it will be great," Mills said. "It will give an incentive for companies nationwide to move into a lower-taxed area. The waste is going into Yucca Mountain, whether we like it or not."

So far the DOE has spent $9 billion on the project. Costs could top $58 billion, based on an estimate made in 2001.

On a windy morning last week, Postmistress Theora Janis and resident Dollie Murillo stood in front of the Mina Post Office and discussed the desperate need for an economic revival in their community.

The town's population has dropped to about 100 people, most of them senior citizens. Many homes and businesses are abandoned. The elementary school was closed five years ago. The train tracks were pulled out 10 years ago.

"They already carry (hazardous) waste through here by trucks," Janis said. "We need jobs. A railroad would help us."

Whether the DOE allows private business to share its Yucca Mountain line has not been determined.

"The rail line could be open to commercial use, but that is a decision that remains to be made," Benson said.

Bob Halstead, a transportation consultant for the Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the DOE has been trying to win favor for the new rail line by suggesting to community leaders that the line will be shared with commercial trains.

Loux doubts a new rail line would provide any upside to rural Nevada. About the only benefit would be selling lunches or dinners to workers building the line, he said.

"They had a rail line to Mina for 50 years and it didn't do anything for them," Loux said. "Every rail line there in the past has been torn out."

The only reason the DOE can contemplate construction of the Mina route is because of a change in thinking by the Walker Lake Paiute Indian Tribe, Loux said.

The tribal council in 1991 had rejected a move by the DOE to study moving waste through the reservation by rail. But last April, council members agreed to let the government study the issue.

Ammunition bound for the Hawthorne depot now is carried by rail past tribal headquarters, homes and a school in the town of Schurz. Under the DOE study plan, the rail line would be relocated about four miles outside of town.

Chairwoman Genia Williams refused to answer questions about the change in position when visited by a reporter last week. Instead, she handed out a prepared statement saying the council opposes the new rail line unless the DOE addresses all safety issues and agrees to ban shipments of nuclear waste by truck on Highway 95.

"Historically our tribe has been a victim of federal government decisions," Williams said. "I do not like the idea of Nevada being a dumping ground for nuclear waste, but this may be a chance to make my tribal community safer from nuclear waste that may come through our community on a highway," she added.

Williams also refused to discuss whether the DOE has offered any financial incentives to win the tribe's support for the route. A source familiar with the tribe, however, said the DOE mentioned rewarding the tribe with $100 million if it agreed to the rail plan.

Back in Silver Springs, Brittain walks beside the tracks and wonders if the hoopla about the nuclear trains is meaningless.

"I can't believe Harry Reid will let Yucca Mountain happen," he said.

Reid, D-Nev., said as the new Senate majority leader he controls what comes up on the Senate floor and he will continue his opposition to Yucca Mountain.

Loux figures the project is dead and the hearings to discuss a new rail line through rural Nevada are something of a sham.

"All of this is a big morass that DOE can't get through," Loux said. "There is no chance of federal legislation. Reid and company are in a position to move to zeroing out their budget and just shutting it down."

Benson recognized Reid's influence during a hearing Monday in Goldfield.

But until federal law changes, he said his agency will continue on its objective to open a Yucca Mountain nuclear repository by 2017. That date, he added, can be met "assuming we can get the budgets we need" from Congress.

"Creating Yucca Mountain as the repository is the law of the land," Benson said. "If Congress changes the law, we will follow it."