Attorney’s ashes released at Yucca

WASHINGTON -- Joe Egan's dying wish was granted over the weekend, when the ashes of the attorney who led Nevada's fight against nuclear waste were scattered at Yucca Mountain.

A group of 18 family members, friends and work associates hiked a quarter mile up the base of the mountain's west side on Saturday and held a short ceremony officiated by an elder of the Western Shoshone Nation, several participants said.

Egan died in May at age 53 from gastro-esophageal cancer. He was Nevada's lead attorney in lawsuits seeking to halt the nuclear waste repository the Department of Energy proposes to build at the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In the obituary he wrote before he died on May 7, Egan said he arranged for his remains "to be spread across the volcanic terrain, with the eulogy, 'radwaste buried here only over my dead body.' "

Under a clear sky, the participants stood in a circle as the Western Shoshone elder lit a small bundle of sage and broadcast the smoke with an eagle feather. A prayer by Corbin Harney, the longtime Shoshone spiritual leader who died last year, was read to the group.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, Egan's wife, daughter and brother released his ashes from a wooden urn.

Just then, "a breeze from the south started so it carried the ashes toward the face of the west side of the mountain," said Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force who attended.

Treichel said the ceremony took place on BLM land, and the group did not enter the restricted Nevada Test Site where the repository's exploratory tunnel is located.