LAS VEGAS (AP)—A tribal council member drew applause during a public hearing on a proposed national nuclear waste dump when he accused the Energy Department of "environmental racism."
"Transportation of waste to Yucca Mountain would place a disproportionate burden upon the Western Shoshone nation and has not been addressed," Western Shoshone National Council member Ian Zabarte told a Monday hearing on environmental impacts and transportation plans for the repository in the Nevada desert.
"It is environmental racism," he said.
The open forum in Las Vegas was one in a series hosted by the federal Energy Department as it collects comment on plans to ship to Yucca Mountain and bury some 77,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and military waste.
More than 200 people, mostly from southern Nevada, attended the hearing with about two dozen Energy Department employees and consultants.
"It's a tremendous turnout," said Allen Benson, the top Energy Department official at the Las Vegas hearing. "I think a lot of people take this seriously. It's important that they come out and talk to us about their views."
Similar sessions in recent weeks drew a combined 244 public attendees and 71 speakers in Hawthorne, Caliente, the Reno area, Amargosa Valley, Goldfield and Lone Pine, Calif., Benson said. A final hearing was planned Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
Few of the 53 people who signed up to speak at Monday's hearing favored the Energy Department plan. They criticized a draft supplemental impact statement for surface facilities to handle nuclear waste canisters, and another analysis of building a rail line from Caliente to reach Yucca Mountain improvements over an environmental impact document issued in 2002.
Congress relied on the earlier environmental report when it approved entombing the nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The revised documents and a 90-day public comment period come as the Energy Department ramps up efforts to meet a self-imposed June 30 deadline to submit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission an application for a repository operating license.
Paul Seidler, an official with the Nuclear Energy Institute in Las Vegas, said the revised document showed small transportation impacts to Nevada. The institute is a lobbying organization for the nuclear power industry.
Before speaking publicly, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, a longtime project opponent, called the federal plans for transporting nuclear waste across the nation and through Las Vegas "a disaster waiting to happen."
"If the material is as safe as we're told it is, let it stay where it presently exists," Goodman told the crowd.
Robert Halstead, transportation adviser for the state Nuclear Projects Agency, said the spent reactor fuel and defense waste destined for Yucca Mountain contained more lethal elements than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.
Each truck cask of spent nuclear fuel would contain 350,000 curies of radioactive cesium and strontium, or about 20 to 30 times the amount of fission products released by the Hiroshima bomb, Halstead said.
"Every dedicated train hauling three or four rail casks would contain more cesium-137 than the total amount released during the Chernobyl nuclear power accident," he said. He referred to the April 1986 explosion at a reactor in Ukraine that spewed radiation over a large swath of the former Soviet Union and much of northern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people were resettled.
Halstead noted that since the 2002 Energy Department impact statement, the residential population within a half-mile of the rail route through Las Vegas has doubled from 45,000 to about 90,000.
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Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal [1]