Larry Hendrics/Arizona Daily Sun The south entrance to Yucca Mountain, Nevada. which is the proposed site for storage of all high level nuclear waste in the U.S.
By LARRY HENDRICKS
Sun Staff Reporter
10/21/2004
YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. -- At the top, cold wind cuts to the bone. Creosote bush grabs defiantly to parched soils of a dozen different shades of brown. Desolation abounds in spartan splendor.
The nearly three dozen visitors from Coconino County stare in one direction Tuesday morning at the Nevada Test Site, where hundreds of atomic bombs have been detonated over the years. In another direction, they see a mountain range that shrouds Groom Lake, also known as Area 51, in mystery. Death Valley is beyond another mountain range to the southwest.
Three Flagstaff elected officials are among the crowd atop Yucca Mountain. Based on what they've heard by staff under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy, they said the repository appears to be a done deal. What concerns them is not the safety of the repository itself, which has more than a decade of scientific study to its credit, but the fact that tons of the radioactive waste to be stored here -- tentatively scheduled to begin in 2010 -- will have to come through Coconino County and Flagstaff to get here.
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According to information from DOE, nearly 50,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste sit in 131 locations in 39 states. All of that material is above ground and within 75 miles of more than 160 million citizens, posing vast environmental hazard and making the material potentially vulnerable to sabotage or theft. Yucca Mountain is an effort to put all of that radioactive waste in one spot, deep under ground.
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The Flagstaff Fire Department has radiation response capability, Driscoll said. The county also has hazardous materials emergency response plans in place, to include radioactive waste. And radioactive waste of a much lower level than the waste proposed to be stored at Yucca Mountain already gets transported through the city on a regular basis to a low-level nuclear waste site near Carlsbad, N.M.
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Transportation safety is what concerns Donaldson and city councilmembers Karen Cooper and Kara Kelty, who also took the trip to Yucca Mountain. During the trip, Donaldson began planning with Driscoll on setting up a demonstration in the near future for city residents to see how high-level radioactive waste will be transported through the city.
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