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Also this issue: Newspaper Phone Spam |
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May 9-15, 2002
slant
The federal government wants to put nuclear waste on trucks and trains and maybe boats and move it all over the countryside. Unless you live in Alaska, Hawaii or work on Tom Brokaw’s ranch in Montana, there’s a good chance waste will go through your town.
Pennsylvania, for instance, is tentatively slated for as many as 11,500 nuclear-waste shipments. Of those, about 1,500 truckloads would pass through Philadelphia on as-yet unidentified highways, heading west from the Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey.
And the waste won't pass by just once, but over and over again, like clockwork, over the next three decades or so.
The Bush administration wants to put this stuff on the road so it can dump it in tunnels drilled into a place called Yucca Mountain near Las Vegas. Ah, Las Vegas. Often viewed as galactic headquarters for capitalist extremism, commercial tastelessness run amok and corporate control of civic institutions, you'd think Bush would like it more.
But Las Vegas is also the home of hundreds of thousands of people who are pulling off something rare and wonderful -- making a living wage in a service economy. No matter what you think of Las Vegas, its working people are just folks, and they and their families don't deserve the nation's nastiest garbage dumped in their backyard.
For that matter, nobody in Philadelphia deserves a truckload of nuclear waste spilled on the Schuylkill or I-95 during rush hour, either.
Congress could be uncharacteristically productive and halt Bush's mobile madness before it gets started. Oh, the Republican-controlled House, something of a waste dump in its own right, is about to rubber-stamp the Yucca project. But the Senate, which will vote on Yucca later this summer, is shaping up more competitively, radioactive-wise.
High-level radioactive waste is about the meanest material humans have managed to create so far, and there could ultimately be as many as 100,000 shipments of this stuff, most of it traveling nearly coast-to-coast. That's a lot of combined mileage, and even the pompom-wielding boosters in the Department of Energy admit trucks and trains are going to crash from time to time. Actual-size transport casks have never been tested -- our atomic enthusiasts in government and industry are settling for computer simulations and half-speed war games with half-sized containers.
Though waste isn't on the road yet, nuclear industry spokesman Spencer Abraham, who also serves as energy secretary in the Bush administration, has begun dispersing radioactive rhetoric hither and yon. He says Yucca Mountain will make us safer because the nation's waste will be consolidated in one spot.
In fact, it takes five years for waste to "cool" enough to be handled. As long as nuclear reactors are operating, there will always be nuclear waste in pools at reactor sites. Shipping waste to Nevada won't mean fewer radioactive targets for some wack-job with a black-market shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon, but more. And Abraham knows it.
The more scientists learn about Yucca Mountain itself, the less they want to put waste there. The original Reagan-era legislation to "study" Yucca Mountain, known in Nevada as the "Screw Nevada Bill," said a dump would be selected for its "natural barriers"-- a site's geology would have to be stable enough to contain radioactivity. It turns out that Yucca Mountain, which sits on an aquifer and in an earthquake zone, doesn't meet the criteria, and the radioactivity will escape.
So now the Department of Energy, rather acrobatically, says geology doesn't matter. The "engineered barriers," glorified drop cloths and such, will do the trick. Well, science and technology have managed to create a radioactive byproduct that lasts for tens of thousands of years. But efforts to manufacture materials that can contain the stuff for just as long haven't been as successful -- just another of the many pesky details prompting independent reviews to characterize the scientific conclusions behind Bush's designation of Yucca Mountain as "weak."
Science, alas, isn't what nuclear-waste policy is all about. Once the Screw Nevada Bill passed, Yucca became the only place the government eyeballed for a solution to the waste problem. No other alternatives have been considered. Whether Yucca Mountain is the right or wrong answer doesn't matter to the nuclear-power industry and its political apologists. It's an answer, so hush, while we throw good money after bad.
Sign a petition (www.yuccapetition.org), and even get in touch with your senators (Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121). If they think they're going to vote to ship waste through town on its way to Yucca Mountain, tell them to snap out of it.
Hugh Jackson writes and works on energy policy in Las Vegas for the consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper interim editor, 123 Chestnut St., third floor, Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.
