YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. -- Things have a grand scale out here. The Nevada
Test Site adjacent to this mountain is bigger than Rhode Island but smaller than
Nellis Air Force Base, which also is adjacent. But the biggest thing is the
dispute, now roiling a second decade, about carving a nuclear waste repository
in this mountain's innards, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The Bush administration says that sound science proves this: Because of
the aridity of this eastern end of the Death Valley hydrologic basin and because
of what scientists have learned about the mountain's reaction to the sort of
heat that will be generated by the slowly decaying waste and because
metallurgical advances will make waste containers extraordinarily durable, no
significant corrosion can threaten the structural integrity of containers that
will hold the waste for at least 10,000 years -- and probably 80,000.
Not so, says Steve Frishman, a geologist employed by Nevada. He insists
that enough water will reach the metal containers to cause, within just 200
years, seepage of radioactive waste that will threaten the groundwater and
irrigation systems. He says that by emphasizing metallurgy, his adversaries
prove that they have to disregard the principal criterion for a satisfactory
repository -- that "geology is the workhorse." He says geologic disposal of
nuclear waste is feasible in rock less porous to water than this mountain is --
in granite deposits of a sort found from Minnesota to North Carolina. For
Nevadans who are not scientists, all they want to hear is: Not here.
NIMBY -- not in my back yard -- is a normal response, but Nevada is
mostly back yard: 92 percent of the state is owned by the federal government.
And Nevada has a history of being put to unusual uses.
In 1864 it was rushed into statehood before it had the required number
of residents because President Lincoln thought he might need its three electoral
votes. When the Comstock Lode's silver was exhausted, so, too, was Nevada:
Between 1880 and 1900, while other mountain states' populations tripled,
Nevada's declined, from 62,266 to 42,335. Some Easterners, thinking that one
senator for each 22,500 people was ridiculous, suggested stripping Nevada of
statehood.
But Nevada, practicing "entrepreneurial federalism," built a gaudy
future from the marriage of divorce and gambling. Some states had competed for
the "migratory divorce" business -- people shopping for the most permissive
laws. In 1931 Nevada crushed competitors by enacting a six-week residency
requirement for divorce and by legalizing gambling.
This not notably decorous state rests on what it decorously calls
"gaming," an industry that prospers from people not understanding risks with
thrown dice or shuffled cards. Risk assessment tests rationality, and Oscar
Goodman, the flamboyant former mob lawyer and current mayor of Las Vegas, is
flunking the test when he promises to block any truck passing through his city
carrying nuclear waste. Well.
Union Pacific freight trains rumble less than a half a mile behind many
of the 75,000 hotel rooms on the Strip. Some tank cars contain chlorine gas and
other hazardous materials. An industrial society uses, and hence transports,
vast quantities of them, weighing their benefits against their risks and trying
to reduce the latter.
Mayor Goodman, relax: Very little nuclear waste will come to Yucca
Mountain by truck. Most will come by rail, on a line not yet built, that will
loop far around the metropolitan area's 1.6 million residents. In the past 40
years more than 2,700 shipments of spent nuclear fuel have been transported more
than 1.6 million miles. Four highway and four railway vehicles were involved in
accidents, but no container of nuclear materials failed.
Las Vegas is farther from this mountain than 161 million Americans are
from 125 nuclear waste storage facilities in 39 states. These sites are much
less secure than Yucca Mountain would be, with the material 1,000 feet below
ground and the mountain located next to the Nuclear Emergency Support Team at
Nellis.
The nation should generate much more than the one-fifth of its
electricity nuclear power currently produces. Forty percent of the Navy is
nuclear-powered. More nuclear waste is produced daily.
Nevada has two tactics. It is insisting on a degree of certainty --
absolute certainty, over 100 millennia -- that is unreasonable, even considering
the stakes. And it is making testable assertions about geological and
metallurgical matters about which scientists are reaching conclusions that are
beyond reasonable doubts.
Three truths: America must store nuclear waste more safely, can never
prove perfect safety forever and hence cannot store waste anywhere it will be
welcomed. An axiom: Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that
basket.