Rancher in shadow of Yucca fears worst from planned nuke dump

When Amargosa Valley rancher Ralph McCracken bought his 70-acre ranch in 1992 he didn't know Yucca Mountain was in the neighborhood, let alone that it might one day contain the nation's high-level nuclear wastes.

Now as McCracken, 53, and his wife Debbie, 44, look at the mountain out their bedroom window every day, U.S. Department of Energy scientists are working in a tunnel deep under the rock, studying the mountain as the proposed burial site for 70,000 tons of highly radioactive waste.

The McCrackens go about their daily chores, taking care of their four horses, four dogs and a cat and tending to their 10 acres of pistachio trees, which with McCracken's consulting business support the ranch.

Yet the thought of a nuclear waste repository opening in 2010 has the McCrackens thinking about their future in the shadow of a mountain that even government scientists expect someday to leak radiation beyond its 12-mile perimeter.

The fact that government scientists say someday will come in thousands of years -- long past his lifetime and the lifetimes of his children and grandchildren -- gives McCracken no comfort.

"Leaky containers and a leaky mountain is not containment," said McCracken, whose ranch lies about 20 miles from the mountain.

The McCrackens expressed their concerns to a CBS-TV network crew this week. Their interview, complete with ranch scenes and horses, is scheduled to air Sunday on the CBS Sunday Evening News.

The DOE's 1,400-page draft environmental impact statement on Yucca Mountain says the repository will likely spread radiation through ground water. But scientists do not know how soon that will occur. They expect it will be thousands to millions of years, DOE's Yucca Mountain assessment leader Tim Sullivan said.

Although the McCrackens rely on ground water for their horses and themselves to drink, that source of contamination doesn't worry McCracken too much. The wells are 200 feet or deeper, and the soils around the wells are full of clay, which should slow any radioactive contamination, he said.

But with the mountain in plain sight, Ralph and Debbie McCracken wonder how long it will be before an accident on the road or at the repository disrupts their idyll.

"It's the stuff they can't contain, the stuff in the mountain or on the road," McCracken said. "There's no more hills between us and Yucca Mountain once it gets out."

Many Nye County residents believe the repository at Yucca Mountain is inevitable. Some are former Nevada Test Site workers. Others worked at the former low-level radioactive waste site at Beatty, just up the road from Yucca Mountain, which operated from 1962 until 1993.

But while the former employment of those residents may have made them more acccustomed to the idea of a government-run nuclear waste dump in their back yards, it also has produced reason to worry. In studying the low-level Beatty dump, U.S. Geological Survey scientists discovered radiation from the unlined burial trenches reached the ground water 300 feet below in less than 30 years.

Since that discovery, Nye County officials have set up an early-warning system to detect radiation escaping from the Nevada Test Site or Yucca Mountain. Eight wells are being drilled and monitored to intercept the southwestern flow of water underground.

Nye County is also hoping to find some government funding to do its own medical screening.

McCracken said he and his wife are waiting for the scientific studies and the politics to play out on the Yucca Mountain project.

Study is fine, he said, but if the repository is built, he would be looking for government money of a different kind.

"If they do it, we want them to do it right," he said.

He would like to see the federal government buy out residents in the Amargosa Valley before the inevitable accident happens.

"It would be cheaper for the government to buy everybody out of the valley, and then go ahead and do it," he said. That would entail paying 1,400 to 2,000 residents, many of whom live in mobile homes.

"Stop development here and move people out now," Ralph McCracken said. "That's economics working. Write me a check. I'll go."

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