Beatty accepts its nuclear fate

BEATTY -- The wind-worn sign that welcomes visitors to Beatty cheerfully touts it as the "Gateway To Death Valley." LaDonna Wilson wouldn't be all that surprised if, in a few years, the slogan changed to something even more upbeat. Like "Where Uranium Goes To Die." Or simply "This Is The End."

"I think it'll be a tourist attraction," Wilson said, referring to Yucca Mountain, the site 10 miles east of Beatty that could become a national nuclear waste repository by 2010. "The tourists will think they'll be able to see something and they'll come out."

Geologists, politicians and pretty much everyone else in Nevada have their theories on what will happen should Congress route the country's high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain for storage. Truck spills. Radiation leaks. The apocalypse.

Whether such ideas have been kicked around on the Senate floor or at the Sour Dough Saloon on Main Street here, it's doubtful anyone has ever believed that Beatty could emerge as a vacation hot spot, a place to enjoy sun, sand dunes and spent fuel rods.

Nor does Wilson, really. Yet more revealing than her tourist-trap prediction is the conviction it's based on: No matter how much Nevada lawmakers squawk and anti-nuke activists squat, the dump is coming to Nye County. That's reality for the 1,623 residents in this hiccup of a town 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"Where else are you going to put it?" Wilson said. The 37-year-old mother of one moved to Beatty with her husband five years ago, well aware they might wind up living next to a nuclear litter box. "So much has been done to the land here, it doesn't make sense to put a repository somewhere else."

There's no small amount of disquiet among Nevadans over storing nuclear waste in the middle of the desert. Except, it seems, in the middle of the desert. In a town where one would expect to find an incurable outbreak of NIMBY -- Not In My Back Yard -- the folks of Beatty appear to have misplaced the "N."

Ascribe some of their poise to conditioning. The Nevada Test Site, birthplace of the mushroom cloud, lurks less than 30 miles away. In 1962, the country's first low-level radioactive waste site was built just outside Beatty; concerns over leaks forced the state to shut down the facility in 1993. Reports of contaminated groundwater in the region surface at least a couple of times a year, and semi-trucks hauling military hardware and toxic waste rumble through at all hours.

So it's safe to assume that jamming spent fuel rods into the earth below Yucca Mountain isn't about to turn Beatty into a ghost town. What could, some residents fret, is if too few of them get jobs out of the deal.

A gold and ore mine operated by Barrick Bullfrog Inc., Beatty's largest employer with 300 workers on its payroll, will close in the next year. If Congress approves Yucca Mountain, the storage facility potentially would offset the loss of mining jobs. There's only one problem. Jobs at the Test Site historically have gone to workers from Clark County, home of the trade unions that provide the lion's share of its labor force.

Beatty residents suspect that pattern would continue with Yucca Mountain, leaving those most directly affected by the repository with nothing to show for it -- save for a groundswell of anger.

"We accept the waste, we accept the risk," Nye County Commissioner Bobby Revert said. "But they don't want to give our young people any jobs. It's a lose-lose situation."

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Beatty is one of those towns that seems to exist only because two highways -- 95 and 374, in Beatty's case -- happen to converge. For most motorists, it's a chance to tank up and stretch out, another rural pit stop ditched in the rearview mirror en route to Las Vegas, Reno or Death Valley.

Not that the people left behind care much. The folks of Beatty think life is awfully good, thanks.

"It's just different here," Revert, 55, who has lived in Beatty since he was a child, said. "It's a lifestyle that's different from any place in the world."

Outsiders would agree -- in a sense. Indeed, not every town served as a welcome mat for the atomic age, nor has a chance to become neighbors with waste generated by the country's 110 licensed nuclear reactors.

Still, to that most obvious of questions -- so why stick around? -- Norma Hamilton has a ready answer.

"My daddy had a saying: 'A man who was born to be hung will not drown,'" Hamilton said. "If I'm going to be killed by a nuclear accident, I'll be killed by a nuclear accident. I'm a fatalist. Live life; don't be afraid of it."

Typical of that credo, Hamilton, 59, toured the Test Site last month to glimpse for herself where fact and fiction diverge. She gazed at Nevada's own moonscape, the land scarred and pockmarked by nearly 1,000 nuclear weapons experiments. She learned that a deep puncturing of the ground could release radiation into the air. She also noticed that visiting the area didn't turn her skin green.

"You can walk around and it won't affect you," Hamilton said. "There's no radiation seeping out of the soil. We never once had to put a space suit on, which was a surprise. That's the kind of rumors you hear."

The eye of a storm is calmer than its fringes. In the same way, Beatty residents sound downright subdued about nuclear waste compared to their Las Vegas counterparts. Instead of forming a Chicken Little choir, they quietly adapt -- even if, like Laura Gad, they would rather see the sky fall than a repository built.

Gad moved to Beatty two years ago after she lost her husband to a heart attack. Yet as certain as she is that the Department of Energy has already squirreled away nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Gad stays. To be on the safe side, she drinks bottled water, and she volunteered for the town's ambulance service to receive training in removal of hazardous materials. The one thing she won't do is gnaw at her fingernails.

"When your time comes, your time comes," Gad, 51, said. "You can sit and hide at home and hope nothing is going to happen to you, or you can get out there and live."

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Guy Sharp arrived in Beatty from his native Pinehurst, Idaho, four years ago. Lured by a friend who told him about jobs at the Bullfrog mine, he pulled into town at nightfall. When the sun came up, Sharp wanted to cry.

"Oh, man," he thought at the time. "There's nothing here."

Sharp smiled at the recollection, then admitted the town has grown on him. Earning "way more than $16 an hour" as an underground technician at Bullfrog has helped, and he's come to appreciate his adopted home for its laid-back manner.

The 26-year-old Sharp represents Beatty's future -- only he probably won't hang around to witness it. With the mine due to close because of rising excavation costs, Sharp might go back to logging in Idaho. Or, given the mining industry's solid reputation for relocating workers, he could end up underground in another state. Good news for him, little solace for Beatty, which has enough trouble retaining Baby Boomers, much less Generation Xers.

"We need economic development here," Larry Gray said. He's chairman of the Beatty Town Advisory Board, which reports to the Nye County Commission. "We need jobs here. We need people living here."

A former Las Vegas resident who tired of round-the-clock police sirens, Gray, 37, came to Beatty in 1993 and carves out a living as owner of the Lost River Trading Co. It's a vintage small-town enterprise, offering a bit of everything, from animal feed to postcards -- but only a couple of jobs.

Truth is, after the Bullfrog mine and Stagecoach hotel-casino, few Beatty businesses employ more than a handful of workers. That makes Yucca Mountain a potential economic deliverer, since it could create jobs for displaced miners who want to remain in town. It also has made the DOE into Beatty Enemy No. 1, because agency officials appear indifferent to the town's plight.

Unions based in Las Vegas supply much of the DOE's Nye County work force. If Yucca Mountain comes to pass, Beatty residents would need to make the four-hour round trip to join a union, then trek back to Las Vegas once a week to check on their status until they landed a job. There would be no guarantee of finding work at the repository -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- since union seniority dictates hiring order.

"It's like the Test Site," Revert fumed. "Ninety percent of the workers come out of Las Vegas. Unions won't take Beatty people."

Buses have carried Test Site workers to and from their homes in Las Vegas and Pahrump for years. Rather than fire up another publicly funded shuttle for Yucca Mountain, Revert suggested the DOE establish a hiring quota at the repository for Nye County residents. To him, it would be the least the department could do for an area that quite literally may get dumped on again.

The Bullfrog mine's closing could trigger an exodus of 800 residents, including workers and their families. Adding to the sting is that the company stands as that rarest of corporate creatures: a good neighbor. Besides providing jobs, Bullfrog resodded the ballfields and built the driving range, and last year installed a water pump for the area.

The DOE, by contrast, offers "squat," John Lupac said.

"The government thinks we're retards," Lupac, a retired Test Site worker affectionately known as "Lip Check" for his rapid-fire speech, said. "... The miners here need the jobs. They want this dump, but they don't got a chance at getting the work."

Despite the glum outlook, residents predict Beatty will endure, if for no better reason than it always has. They deflect comparisons to Tonopah, still economically hobbled by the departure of a military weapons plant earlier this decade.

At the same time, doubts fester about how much ancillary business a repository would bring in. A gas station or two, sure. Possibly a grocery store. Maybe a manufacturer.

After that?

"Forget about it," Lupac said.

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The stench of cow manure wafting from Ponderosa Dairies is powerful enough to make a person grateful that, at the very least, radioactive waste is odorless.

Located 10 miles south of Beatty in Amargosa Valley, Ponderosa is the state's largest dairy, a $20 million operation with 4,600 head of cattle. Of any private agricultural business whose reputation could suffer from its proximity to Yucca Mountain, Ponderosa is by far the biggest. Whispers of concern began drifting over the region late last year, when the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a group of independent scientists assigned to gauge the DOE's impact on Yucca Mountain, launched a groundwater study of the area.

No results are in from the board, but it's apparent Ponderosa Manager Ed Goedhart thinks his heifers will produce fluorescent milk about the same time they touch down from their trip over the moon.

"If there was a problem (with Yucca Mountain), someone at one of the agencies would blow the whistle," he said. "I have the assumption that the government is going to take care of everything."

Nuclear energy critics might pick apart Goedhart's vote of confidence as either a savvy businessman protecting his interests or as the fruits of a DOE public-relations campaign. Both assumptions may be misguided, insofar as Goedhart's is a common perspective. Much as Beatty residents think the DOE is killing their town, they don't believe it's trying to kill them.

"All of this is really safe," Wilson said, alluding to DOE activities. She and her husband are building a house behind the flower shop they run, the surest sign the couple intends to stay awhile. "We have trucks going through town carrying hazardous waste and all kinds of other stuff that we don't know about, but there hasn't been one accident. If we start glowing, we'll know it affected us."

Such assurance perhaps flows from the belief that the stakes remain too high for the DOE to skimp on precautions for a storage site.

Rightly or wrongly, the DOE has devoted considerable time and money to the concept of centralized storage. Since any mishap involving a national repository would increase pressure to leave spent fuel rods at individual reactors, the government's sole option is to get things right the first time.

Or so thinks Edward Neudorf, an orange vendor from Porterville, Calif., who swings through Beatty in his battered '77 Dodge pickup three or four times each spring to hawk citrus.

"No matter in what region of the country you put the site, there are going to be objections," Neudorf said. "But we've developed this nuclear potential, and we have to deal with it (the waste). They're going to take care of it in the safest way possible."

Then again, the DOE is more tolerated than trusted in these parts. And in the end, it could be that residents have no choice but to believe everything will turn out OK.

"It's like the Titanic. People said it couldn't sink," Gad said. "You have people saying Yucca Mountain is foolproof. Nothing is foolproof.

"But sometimes people have to think that way."

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