How the World Lost Yucca Mountain

There is a mountain, 4850 feet of ancient volcanic ash, a short distance from Las Vegas, Nevada. Though no one lives on Yucca Mountain, it has already affected several lives and will continue to haunt humankind for generations to come. I first learned of Yucca mountain in the ballroom of the Silver Legacy casino in Reno, Nevada. I was one of hundreds of volunteers who had banded together for John Kerry, under the direction of MoveOn PAC, during the final days of the presidential race. As we were training, learning what to say as we knocked on Nevada's doors, the group leader mentioned Yucca Mountain. Everyone looked through their information packages, but there was no mention of this controversial mountain in MoveOn's distribution materials. I would like to blame Kerry's loss of the State of Nevada on that tragic oversight; but truly if Nevada's residents were not aware of the problem by Monday morning there was no hope. After all, the government's decades old Yucca Mountain Project had been covered in the Las Vegas Review-Journal nearly every day for years. It had been the focus of John Kerry's campaign in Nevada for months. The project's disregard for human life had already begun manifesting itself in the upheaval of toxic dust and sick workers. If the people of Nevada did not know about the Yucca Mountain Project it is because they did not want to. That is why, with great heaviness of heart, I am now able to write the paper that should never have been:

How the World Lost Yucca Mountain

"As president, I would not sign legislation that would send nuclear waste to any proposed site, either on a permanent or temporary basis unless it had been deemed scientifically safe." Wrote President Bush to Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn on September 28, 2000. Two years later, with the scientific analysis against him Bush approved Yucca Mountain as the storage bin for America's nuclear waste. Early in 2004 it was still unclear as to whether the dump would leak toxins, and at that point the project had been proceeding for years under Bush's wing. "The testing that's being done here has not answered the question we'd like answered" Said Ronald Latanision, an expert on the Yucca Project, in March of 2004. According to Bob Loux, director of the State Agency for Nuclear Projects, "There's no need to hurry here. They have time to find a good repository." Yet the Bush administration obviously has a reason to rush, even at the cost of our country's health. Apparently the nuclear waste which electric companies emit could be contained safely beneath the plants themselves for hundreds of years, causing no immediate or irreversible damage to the environment. In order to prevent this, energy companies played upon the fear of terrorist attacks on the waste to convince the public that the Yucca Mountain Project mush be sped up. Frank von Hippel, a professor at Princeton University, is in the minority which does not give into the terrorist scare. He believes that concentrating America's nuclear waste in one spot will provide an extremely easy target for potential terrorists, if there are any to worry about. "It's very sad. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been captured by the Industry," he said.

In 1983, 68 utilities signed contracts with the Department of Energy (DOE), which promised them that a storage site for their wastes would be secured by 1998. In exchange, DOE has received 17 billion dollars in 15 years from those utilities to fund this endeavor. However, when DOE had no plans to deal with the waste in 1998, the furious energy companies began to sue the government, causing the rushed opening of Yucca Mountain. Nuclear waste remains active for millions of years, far longer than any regime has thus far, and certainly longer that the dollar has had any significance. Billions of dollars should not be the motivation for opening this dump, nor should obscure references to terror.

As of now the government has presented the nation with for options besides the Yucca Mountain Project, all of them both dangerous and absurd. We could leave it where it is, under the utilities, sitting in pools of cold water which (by some inexplicable miracle) prevent it from radiating the people living and working around it. We could bury it in polar ice sheets, throw it into the ocean or launch it into space. Upon reading the DOE website, it sounds as if this waste is about to embark on some very exciting adventures, the consequences of which nobody knows.

Who wants waste too toxic to be dumped anywhere else to be roasting in their own backyard? It seems that many of the people of Nevada do. In fact, Mayor Kevin Phillips of Caliente, a small impoverished town in Nevada, has been begging DOE to transport the waste through their town to provide more jobs. "Phillips maintained his community of 1,200 welcomes the repository and can handle emergencies with financial assistance and training from the federal government. Some of Caliente's residents are not even waiting for government training and have begun to prepare for nuclear emergencies on their own. "We view the rail corridor as an economic benefit for us" Phillips said.

I left MoveOn PAC on Tuesday morning. I worked instead for the Carson City Democratic Committee, and in doing so I really felt like I was making a difference. I went from democrat to democrat in Washoe Valley, leaving door hangers on trailer homes which read, among other things: "There is so much at stake and you can make your voice heard on election day! Vote to stop Yucca Mountain! George Bush supports Yucca. John Kerry says ‘Not on my Watch!'" I was so glad to be distributing brochures that mentioned Yucca Mountain, because I believed that Nevada would never want to hold nuclear waste, nor would it ever have to. Now that I know how desperate people have become, and how Mayor Phillips feels about the Yucca Mountain Project, I almost feel like an unwitting accomplice to the Bush campaign.

Politicians and professors can debate the project until their quite literally blue in the face. Senator Harry Reid said of the project "I think it makes George Bush look like he deceived the state" and yet the deceived state just crowned Bush with a second term. No one could claim that Nevada's citizens were deceived into voting for Bush's reelection- All of the information that I used in this report was gleaned from Las Vegas Review-Journal articles from the last three years. John Kerry wrote in the Review-Journal on May 16, 2004, "I believe there is a better way to secure Nevada's health, environmental and financial well-being." As the world learned on November 2, 2004 health and well-being are not priorities of Nevada's citizens.