Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2000 | 11:48 a.m.
Additional hearings
The Department of Energy has added three more hearings on environmental impacts from a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. They are:
Written comments
The deadline to submit written comments on the DOE's draft environmental impacts is Feb. 9.
Mail to:
EIS Project Manager
M/S 010
U.S. Department of Energy
OCRWM/YMSCO
P.O. Box 30307
North Las Vegas, NV
89036-0307
The Department of Energy expected 70 people to attend a Las Vegas hearing on environmental impacts of burying highly radioactive wastes at Yucca Mountain.
Instead, more than 400 spent over 12 hours Tuesday telling the DOE to keep 77,000 tons of highly radioactive wastes out of Nevada.
Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn, Senate Democrats Richard Bryan and Harry Reid and House Democrat Shelley Berkley -- who voiced their opposition in person or through spokespeople -- received new support from almost 6,000 Realtors and the Howard Hughes Corp.
Economic concerns, environmental impacts and people's fears are missing from the 1,600-page document the DOE produced about the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, speakers said.
Yucca Mountain is the only place being studied to become the world's first high-level nuclear waste repository. If it passes scientific muster, it would open by 2010.
"We have a great concern about what it will do to property values," said Gary Coles, president of the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, which for the first time opposed the Yucca project.
"I don't know why they don't take this effort, this time and this money and do something more on site at the reactors," Coles said.
Howard Hughes Corp. Vice President Tom Warden noted that the DOE failed to look at the economic impacts on the Las Vegas Valley from building a nuclear dump nearby.
"We have an interest in the economic health of Southern Nevada," Warden said. "Tourism is a choice industry. People choose to come here or they choose not to come. We believe the economic impact is real."
Those concerns appear to be shared outside the state, given the 10-to-1 opposition to shipping nuclear wastes to Nevada expressed at other public meetings around the country, state Agency for Nuclear Projects Director Bob Loux said. "Opposition is not just in Nevada," he said.
For Berkley, who is serving her first term in the House, the issue loomed large only after she got to Washington. "I grew up here and always opposed the nuclear dump, but never paid much attention to the issue," she said, calling nuclear wastes "filth." Then came a congressional fight last year over temporary storage of nuclear waste in Nevada. That changed Berkley's stand.
"I will do everything, I will fight with every last breath in my body to keep nuclear waste out of Nevada," Berkley said at a press conference before the hearing, her voice rising through the solar-powered microphone set up outside the Sawyer State Office Building.
Reid and Bryan were both out of the country. However, both voiced their opposition through spokespeople. "I am, and have been, vehemently opposed to the underground storage of nuclear waste in Nevada," Reid said in a prepared statement, vowing continued opposition to the repository.
Bryan's spokeswoman Sara Besser said that many people believed the repository project could not be stopped. "But we have stopped it for a long time, not just in Nevada, but across the country, because people know the difference between right and wrong," she said.
Wendy Dixon, the DOE's project manager for environmental impacts, admitted to the groups that Yucca Mountain was not ensured as a high-level waste repository.
Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa, who was out of the state at a national conference on protecting citizens from Internet crimes, prepared a statement that noted the DOE failed to address "irrefutable evidence" relating to hot water rising inside Yucca that could corrode nuclear containers and spread radiation.
Del Papa referred to microscopic bubbles of gas and liquid found trapped in mineral deposits that showed hot water deposited them. UNLV professor Jean Cline and a panel of scientific experts are trying to date the bubbles, called fluid inclusions. If the bubbles are younger than 1 million years, that could provide evidence that nuclear waste stored in Yucca Mountain could be vulnerable to corrosion by ground water. That study is due to be completed next year.
The DOE also ignored impacts from people's perceived risks and the stigma from nuclear waste shipped through the state, she said.
Sierra Club of Southern Nevada spokeswoman Jane Feldman asked how the DOE found no risks from Yucca when such a project had never been done before. And, she added, why did the DOE fail to translate the impact statement into Spanish and Braille?
Las Vegas resident Terri Robertson said she had heard the same questions and answers for 18 years at numerous DOE hearings. "I want to know when in the holy heck you're going to get it," she asked exhausted DOE officials.
A physician worried about future generations. Dr. Richard Saxon of Los Angeles, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility, said burying radioactive wastes in Yucca Mountain would contaminate the air and water as Southern Nevada's population grew closer to the mountain. He made a reference to the size of the crowd at the Sawyer State Office Building, where the hearing was moved.
"You can get a bigger room, but you cannot get a room big enough to hold future generations who cannot speak against this, even in a democracy," Saxon said.
Not all speakers at the hearing opposed the dump. Some union members wearing white caps saying "Yucca Yes" testified in favor of studying the mountain and storing the wastes to solve a national problem. Nevada could use the dump as a bargaining chip to receive federal funds for schools or other public works, Roy Kimball said.
"They didn't stop building the Strip (resorts) because of atomic bombs," Kimball, 55, said of the nuclear weapons experiments from 1951-1992 at the Nevada Test Site.
But a carpenter who watched his grandfather die of lung cancer and his father struggle with thyroid cancer after working at Oak Ridge, Tenn., part of the DOE's nuclear weapons complex, said a job isn't worth sacrificing families.
Homer Johnson, a member of Carpenters Local 1780 in Tennessee who has also been trained by the military in biological, chemical and nuclear accidents, suggested leaving nuclear wastes in each state where it is produced.
"Nuclear accidents are dangerous," Johnson, 41, said. "You don't just let it lay there and wait to clean it up. It's in the air and it will get into the water. I've read your reports and I don't trust them."
As the hearing went late into the night, DOE officials realized the Las Vegas hearing had the largest turnout in the state over Yucca's environmental impacts.
"This has been the single greatest day for people saying no," said Kevin Kamps of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a clearinghouse based in Washington.
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