Democrats criticize Nevada nuclear waste site plan
Date: 07-May-02
Country: USA
Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn has vetoed the plan to bury nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site. The administration and Republicans in Congress are working to override him, with the House of Representatives due to vote on the issue next week.
"Yucca Mountain would do nothing to fix the nuclear waste problem in our country," Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley said in the weekly Democrat radio address. "The ... project would put us all at risk by transporting mobile Chernobyls across all our communities."
Opponents of the plan argue that transporting tens of thousands of shipments of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain poses unacceptable safety risks, and will anyway fail to significantly reduce the amount of waste held at other sites, mainly the nuclear power plants that produce it.
"The government's own statistical models show us we can expect between 50 and 300 accidents involving nuclear waste," Berkley said. "An accident involving nuclear waste could be catastrophic, exposing whole communities to radiation and utterly destroying the environment."
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent government agency that will have to license the storage site, last week told Congress nuclear waste from commercial power plants could be safely transported by rail.
While no final transportation plan has emerged, the administration favors rail to haul 3,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel annually to Yucca Mountain from 131 reactor sites in 39 states. It will take roughly 25 years to fill the underground site, the Energy Department estimates.
Berkley said such shipments would be a tempting target for groups such as Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
"We already know that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are looking for a 'dirty (nuclear) bomb,'" she said. "These waste transports are exactly the type of target-rich environment they are looking for."
