Thursday, March 20, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Ecology activist, author and radio commentator Harvey Wasserman has a suggestion for nuclear power plant executives with mounting tons of radioactive waste on their hands: Keep it.
The owner of the Wasserman Uniform Co. in Ohio, Wasserman already explored nuclear horrors with Norm Solomon in the book, "Killing Our Own," a look at nuclear weapons and power from the Hiroshima bomb to the Chernobyl reactor accident.
In his latest work, "Planet Earth: How It Works -- How to Save It," Wasserman tackles environmental problems and gives solutions.
As far as opening a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Wasserman said forget it.
"It's a false impression that the rest of the country wants to dump nuclear waste in Nevada," he said in a telephone interview. The more low-level or high-level nuclear wastes are transported, the greater the chance of an accident, he said.
"There's no magic bullet to transport it to Nevada," Wasserman said. "All it is is a form of corporate welfare so power plant owners relieve themselves of corporate responsibility by dumping on Nevada."
Instead, Wasserman suggests that utilities shut down the 109 operating nuclear reactors and invest the funds set aside to close them down. "Put a fence around the plants and leave it there while the fund grows," he said.
Current plans call for a national storage facility for highly radioactive wastes. Congress is considering bills to temporarily store the wastes at the Nevada Test Site, while Yucca Mountain is under study by the U.S. Department of Energy. There is no other part of the country under consideration for storage or dumping. And the nuclear industry sued the DOE to try and force the agency to take the waste by January 1998.
"We (environmentalists) think it's a tragedy that the federal government is even considering taking on this stuff," Wasserman said. "It's basically socialism for the rich."
As for low-level wastes created in hospitals, clinics and laboratories, every state should have a small dump, he said.
Wasserman is set to speak at 7:30 p.m. Friday during a traditional service at the storefront synagogue Adat Ari El, 3310 S. Jones Blvd. at Desert Inn Road.
His appearance is sponsored by the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation along with the Nuclear Waste Task Force and the local chapter of the Sierra Club.
Wasserman has explored alternative energy, as well as environmental travesties. He's convinced wind power and solar energy can replace nuclear power and fossil-burning sources of electricity.
Such alternatives create fear in nuclear executives, he said, because they can't compete in the new era of competition. "They want the taxpayers to take the nuclear waste off their hands and the ratepayers to pay for the stranded (construction funding) costs," he said. "The public is being screwed both ways."
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