Congresswoman Shelley Berkley - Legislation: Editorials

Let’s see if this makes sense to you: take 77,000 tons of deadly, high level nuclear waste. Stuff it into really big metal cans. Screw the lids on tight. Then take 30 years and 100,000 long-haul trips to ship it over the nation’s interstates and railways, through the backyards of 50 million people who live within a half-mile of the travel routes. At the end of the journey, dump the high-level nuclear waste into a site that just last month suffered a 4.4 Richter scale earthquake, in an area where the earth moves on a regular basis.

That is what H.R. 45 would do. My Nevada colleague, Senator Dick Bryan, has aptly called the proposal a ‘mobile Chernobyl.’

When you live in a state that has been singled out as the target for a nuclear payload, you give close attention to the issue. Nevadans know just how toxic, how dangerous, how menacing high-level nuclear waste really is. A person standing next to an unshielded spent nuclear assembly would get a fatal dose of radiation in just three minutes.

But H.R. 45 would place the entire country at risk. This is more than a ‘not in my backyard’ issue. This is a ‘not in anybody’s backyard’ issue.

The transportation of high level nuclear waste binds Nevadans with all Americans as potential victims of H.R. 45. Americans from all parts of the country would be exposed to unacceptable and unnecessary risk, because they live near the highways and railroads where the nuke trucks and trains would roll.

The waste will rumble through 43 states and hundreds of cities and towns - Birmingham, Alabama; Laramie, Wyoming; Portland, Maine; suburbs of Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri; the list goes on and on. In short, the deadly transport of nuclear waste will be on the move through your backyard and mine, all over the country, morning, noon, and night - for 30 years.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has counted more than 99,000 incidents in which hazardous materials were released from trucks and trains from 1987 to 1996, causing 356 major injuries and 114 deaths. Your average train derailment or 16-wheeler crash is horrific enough. Now imagine it with a full load of high level nuclear waste. The Department of Energy has described a plausible crash scenario involving high impact and fire that would contaminate an area of 42 square miles with radioactive debris. That’s about the size of San Francisco or Boston.

We’ve been told repeatedly that shipping nuclear waste across the country and stashing it in a dumpsite is safe. But let’s take a brief look at the history of how the federal government has handled nuclear projects. The lands around Hanford, Washington; Rocky Flats, Colorado; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Fernald, Ohio are all poisoned with nuclear leftovers. The General Accounting Office concluded that 124 of our 127 nuclear sites had been mismanaged by the Department of Energy.

And with that track record, those in favor of shipping and storing nuclear waste say, “There’s nothing to worry about. Trust us.”

Neither I nor most Nevadans buy into the ‘don’t worry, be happy’ attitude towards radiation, for our own sake and that of the country. We’ve seen the results up close and personal. Nevadans were proud to volunteer for the patriotic chore of playing host to above and below ground nuclear weapons testing. But the federal government never leveled with us about the risks.

The government produced films advising if people just stayed indoors as clouds of fallout dust drifted through communities, everyone would be safe. And for good measure, the government suggested that a quick car wash would eliminate any pesky radioactive contamination.

It would be funny except for the evidence of a disturbing increase in cancer that traumatized these communities. Funny, perhaps, if above-ground testing didn’t spread radioactive elements across the country. Supposedly safe above-ground nuclear tests were stopped when it was proved that the radioactive element strontium-90 was winding up in the bodies of American children.

Underground testing was supposed to be the safe answer, or so the government said. The radioactivity would be trapped underground, never to get out - except that some of the underground shafts burst open, spewing radiation into the air. And now scientists are finding that plutonium, thought to be trapped in those test shafts, is moving through the groundwater with alarming speed.

So I have a healthy skepticism about federal nuclear programs. My healthy skepticism tells me that H.R. 45 is nothing more than a Trojan Horse for permanently dumping high level waste in Nevada. There is nothing temporary about H.R. 45. This bill is a political vehicle, as toxic as the cargo it would ship, to get the waste to Nevada and conveniently park it next to Yucca Mountain, the site of a failing effort to justify a permanent dump.

Yucca Mountain is failing as a site for a permanent nuclear waste dump because of an accelerating number of scientific ‘surprises’ that eliminate it as a nuclear safety deposit box. Yucca Mountain was supposed to be dry, but scientists have discovered that water, the ultimate solvent, is seeping through it nonetheless. Yucca Mountain does not stand still - it is regularly jolted by earthquakes. In January, the earth shook with a 4.4 Richter-scale earthquake. And a growing number of scientists are discovering in addition to water seepage and earthquakes, Yucca Mountain may well explode into an environmental apocalypse of volcanic proportions.

Water, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and nuclear waste. Does this sound like a bad combination to you, too?

H.R. 45 exists only because the nuclear power industry wants to keep the Yucca Mountain project alive by building a temporary dump next door. If the waste were stacked up right by the mountain, it would be a powerful motivation to somehow make Yucca Mountain work out. As the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board has clearly stated, a temporary facility at the Nevada test site could prejudice the later decisions about the suitability of Yucca Mountain.

H.R. 45 puts expediency over public health and welfare. It throws out existing radiation safety standards and replaces them with dangerous levels of radiation that would be labeled ‘acceptable.’ H.R. 45 allows Nevadans to be exposed to up to six times the radiation permitted at other waste sites. H.R. 45 allows radiation exposure 25 times the level set by the Safe Drinking Water Act, and up to ten times the level allowed in other countries.

There have been some encouraging developments in the battle to stop H.R. 45. The President has long maintained he would veto the bill. And, at a Feb. 25 Senate hearing, Energy Secretary Richardson offered a plan under which the federal government would take title and responsibility for spent nuclear waste at reactors. The waste would remain on-site at the reactors while scientific studies progress on a permanent solution to the problem of high-level nuclear waste. At the very least, Secretary Richardson’s proposal needs to remain an active part of the discussion over what to do with high-level nuclear waste.

H.R. 45 achieves nothing aside from putting the health and safety of Nevadans and all Americans at grave risk. It is unnecessary, it is unsafe, and it is unpatriotic. I will stand on the floor of Congress, on the roads, and on the rails to stop America’s backyards from turning into a nationwide test site for nuclear waste.