Beatty waste fire sparks fears among Yucca opponents

By Scott Lucas

Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015 | 2 a.m.

A series of explosions and a fire at a low-level nuclear waste depository in Beatty last week provides further reasons to oppose a proposal to store radioactive material at Yucca Mountain, retired Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., said Tuesday.

“I was stunned” by the incident, said the longtime opponent of a repository at Yucca of the incident, who served as governor of Nevada from 1983 to 1989. “This stuff is highly dangerous.”

Bryan’s comments came as an anti-Yucca activist group, the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, released maps that it said showed the risks associated with transporting nuclear material from nuclear power plants across the country to Yucca. Truck or rail shipments would run through all but two continental states — Montana and North Dakota. In addition to those that would go through Nevada, the greatest number of shipments would travel through Utah, Illinois, Nebraska and Wyoming.

With the creation of the Basin and Range National Monument effectively closing down the most likely approach to Yucca Mountain by rail, shipments now would likely be trucked through the Spaghetti Bowl in downtown Las Vegas, critics of the plan say. In Clark County, over 220,000 people live within the “radiological region of influence,” an area a half-mile wide on each side of the routes.

Those shipments would present an unacceptable level of risk to residents, said the opponents. “This stuff should not be coming across the country,” said Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman. “This is something that cuts across party lines.”

According to the study, were Yucca to store nuclear material, over 1,600 shipments of waste would be carried into Nevada from California alone.

The new report comes as a federal-level push to store nuclear waste in Nevada appears to have indefinitely stalled. This summer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission completed the final element of a decade-long safety study, but in 2010, President Barack Obama revoked federal support for the project, leading Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., to declare it effectively dead. In the face of Reid’s retirement, several Republican members of the House have proposed restarting the dormant effort. In March, Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., introduced legislation that would prohibit nuclear waste storage without an agreement between the energy secretary and the governor and other local elected officials.

At the announcement of the new report, anti-Yucca advocates acknowledged the “Groundhog Day” aspect of their work. “We had a press conference just like this one 20 years ago,” said Judy Treichel, the executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.