Increased nuke loads worry county official

Dennis Bechtel worried last December when he heard about the three trucks carrying low-level radioactive waste that rumbled through Las Vegas while leaking liquids.

As director of the Clark County Nuclear Waste Division, Bechtel is becoming more concerned about increasing low-level radioactive shipments rolling through the valley for burial at the Nevada Test Site as the U.S. Department of Energy cleans up its Cold War sites nationwide.

He predicts citizens will become more concerned as they become more aware of the amount of material being trucked through Las Vegas and the potential for danger.

The public will have a chance Wednesday to voice any concerns to a panel set up for that exact purpose. The panel will meet and hear comments from from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at the U.S. Department of Energy, 232 Energy Way, west of Losee Road in North Las Vegas.

Formally known as the Citizens Advisory Board for the Nevada Test Site, or CAB, the panel is similar to many nationwide. The panels were created to allow people to tell the Department of Energy of their concerns about the agency's activities.

As December's shipments from the government's uranium processing plant in Fernald, Ohio, showed, low-level waste can leak.

All routes for carrying contaminated soils, equipment and sludge could lead through Las Vegas on rail or road routes.

While the DOE has shipped low-level nuclear waste to the Test Site for 40 years, the number of truckloads crossing Hoover Dam and rolling through the heart of Las Vegas could increase dramatically under the federal cleanup plan.

As many as three trucks a day, five days a week, packed with low-level nuclear waste from 16 federal sites across the country, may come through Las Vegas and over Hoover Dam as soon as the year 2002.

Bechtel asks: "How much nuclear waste is Southern Nevada willing to accept?"

"I'm surprised that the public has ignored it," Bechtel said of one proposal that would turn the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of the city, into the major nuclear dump for most of DOE's low-level radioactive waste.

Carl Gertz, DOE's assistant manager for environmental management, agrees that radioactive waste shipments could increase as former federal bomb-making sites undergo cleanup.

The DOE was shipping about 700 truckloads a year to the Test Site before the December leaks, Gertz said. The DOE stopped all Fernald shipments until faulty containers and communication between Nevada and Ohio DOE offices improve.

The DOE is also seeking alternative routes for the shipments, outside the Las Vegas metro area, Gertz said.

A DOE environmental impact plan sets the range of shipments from as little as 200 or as many as 1,000 loads a year, depending on whether Nevada becomes a central or regional site.

If the Test Site becomes a central repository, the loads could reach 20 a week rumbling through Las Vegas. Gertz guesses Nevada will become a regional site.

"Some sites will keep wastes on site, that is why there is such a wide range," Gertz said. For example, contaminated soils in central Nevada from the Tonopah Test Range will be disposed on site.

The DOE has another option. It could send some hazardous and radioactive wastes to private companies. Enviro Care Corp., a commercial disposal site in Utah, is taking some wastes, he said.

A $1 billion budget from a total of $2.2 billion requested for Test Site cleanup will help the government dispose and manage low-level radioactive waste and to track nuclear materials buried beneath the desert from 828 underground weapons experiments.

The DOE estimates that shipments through the year 2006 will cost taxpayers $77 million. The bulk of $590 million will be spent on accepting wastes between 2007 and 2070.

Radioactive wastes end up at a site based on the intensity of the radiation they contain. High-level nuclear wastes from commercial reactors would go to a site such as Yucca Mountain, under study 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas by the DOE.

Plutonium-laced materials, called transuranic wastes, are headed to a site near Carlsbad, N.M.

A third class of radioactive wastes combines toxic chemicals with radioactive materials and is called mixed waste.

Low-level radioactive wastes are not included in any of the other categories.

But contaminated ground water surrounding below-ground nuclear test caverns will remain in the ground at the Test Site.

Gertz said the DOE will monitor that ground water. Underground tests will cost $177 million through 2006 and $133 million until 2070 to keep tabs on it. Testing 70 wells on and off the site to date has shown nothing escaping the current areas, Gertz said. The federal EPA does testing for off-site wells.

There are 49 wells on the Test Site, 23 off-site wells.

None of the wells have detected radiation levels above the total radiation everyone receives each year, Gertz said. The average background radiation from all sources in air, water, soils, even cosmic radiation from outer space totals 240 millirem per year. An average chest X-ray delivers about 10 millirems.

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