Andy Barron / AP
Republican U.S. Senatorial candidate Sam Brown, with his wife Amy Brown, signs in at the Secretary of State office as he arrives to files his paperwork to run for the Senate, Thursday, March 14, 2024, at the State Capitol in Carson City, Nev. Brown is seeking to replace incumbent U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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The federal government’s cavalier attitude toward the safe disposal of high-level nuclear waste created the current untenable situation in which an estimated 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are being stored at hundreds of nuclear-reactor sites across the country.
In a lazy and ignorant attempt at governing, Republicans are circling the wagons in support of once again making Nevada the nation’s nuclear dumping ground by reviving discussions of the Yucca Mountain repository project.
As recently as 2022, Sam Brown, Nevada’s leading Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, called the failure to open Yucca Mountain an “incredible loss of revenue for our state,” and said that “If we don’t act soon, other states … are assessing whether or not they can essentially steal that opportunity from us.”
Republicans in Congress are listening.
At a hearing last month of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, Climate and Grid Security, chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington, described Yucca as “technically successful” and called on the subcommittee to “update the law and build state support for our permanent repository at Yucca Mountain.”
This cannot be allowed to happen. While a long-term storage solution for America’s nuclear waste is needed, it cannot be Yucca Mountain. The site is too dangerous and even Southern Nevada’s love of gambling cannot allow such a reckless bet to be placed on the lives of millions of Americans.
In the past week alone, the Southern California Earthquake Data Center has recorded 45 earthquakes with epicenters within 50 miles of Beatty, the closest city to Yucca Mountain. While the largest tremor had a magnitude of just 1.9, 45 earthquakes in a single week is simply unacceptable for a site that is supposed to store dangerous nuclear waste for millennia.
We say “supposed to” rather than “designed to” because as far back as 20 years ago, a federal court ruled that Yucca Mountain’s design and construction was insufficient for long-term safe and secure storage of radioactive materials. Since then, questions about the structural integrity of the facility have led skeptics to question whether waste would remain secure even in our own lifetime.
Of course, even if the facility is structurally sound, there is an even greater threat posed by the transportation of radioactive nuclear waste to the facility.
In 2017, former Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller gave a presentation to the U.S. Senate in which he displayed a map of the 22,000 miles of railways and 7,000 miles of highways that would be used to relocate the high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.
More than 10 million Americans live within a half-mile of the various routes, meaning they would be exposed to detectable levels of radiation just by being in their home. Those exposed include many of Clark County’s 2.3 million residents as well as many of the 750,000 weekly visitors to the Strip and downtown Las Vegas. That’s because waste would be carried on tracks that run parallel to Interstate 15, right through the middle of the tourist corridor. Even in the absence of a full-scale disaster, the impact on the local economy could be disastrous.
In the worst-case scenario — a terrorist attack or a train derailment that causes a massive release of nuclear waste — you’ve got the basis for an apocalyptic disaster movie.
Citing data compiled by the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects, Heller said it would take 50 years to transport America’s nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. He concluded his presentation by asking his colleagues, “Do you really believe that over the span of 50 years that there won’t be one single transportation accident with an ensuing radiological release?”
We think not.
Nationally, in 2022, there were 1,200 train derailments in America — a number that is increasing as aging rail infrastructure is stressed further by limited staffing and increasingly aggressive rail transit schedules.
As residents of the Ohio River Valley learned, even a single derailment can have a massive impact on people and the environment.
Last year, a derailed train in East Palestine, Ohio, made international headlines as a massive fire sent a plume of black smoke into the air while another plume of cancerous butyl acetate flowed down the Ohio River. If a train derailed and spilled radioactive waste into a tributary of the Colorado River, it might affect the water supply for tens of millions of people.
A scenario like this isn’t speculative — it almost happened here.
In 2019, under the leadership of then-President Donald Trump and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the federal government secretly shipped plutonium by rail to the Nevada National Security Site. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford sued to stop the shipments and increase state oversight of trains traversing federal lands.
Just months after the shipments stopped, a train derailed near the junction with the Yucca Mountain Rail Corridor and sent 33 cargo containers into the Meadow Valley Wash — a tributary of the Muddy River and Lake Mead. Fortunately, the train was only hauling automobiles.
Yucca Mountain must be taken off the table once and for all.
As Robert Halstead, former executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, wrote this year in a guest column for the Sun, “The Yucca Mountain site itself is so flawed that restarting the licensing process would be a serious, distracting waste of time and resources.”
We agree.
Democrats in Nevada’s Senate and House delegations have introduced legislation to require the secretary of energy to obtain written consent from state, local and tribal governments before allocating money from the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for planning, construction or operation of a nuclear waste repository.
The Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act — H.R. 1051 and S. 404 — should be passed immediately for the safety and security of all Americans.
Congress should then formally end the licensing process for Yucca and begin the difficult work of identifying potential new sites for a nuclear waste repository that are safer than Yucca Mountain and have the support of local residents.
