Home, Home on the (Radioactive) Range

By Chip Ward, Tomdispatch.com. Posted December 15, 2003.

The high and dry Great Basin Desert covers much of western Utah and most of Nevada. Its vast scenery -- barren gray ranges and sage covered plains -- are an acquired taste that few Americans have acquired. Most consider the lonely drive from Salt Lake City to Reno a sleep-inducing and bladder-busting ordeal. Home to flash floods, wildfires, coyotes and seismic catastrophes, the Great Basin is unloved and, therefore, easily abused. It is where we once practiced atomic, then chemical and biological warfare. It is covered with bombing ranges. Today, it is becoming a time-bomb graveyard for nuclear waste that cannot be abided where it is generated.

Those of us who live on the boundaries of such Great Basin facilities as the Nevada Test Site, or the nuclear reservation at Hanford, Washington, or Dugway Proving Grounds have been "downwinders" before. We know how the economics of costs, risks, and liabilities can get translated not only into federal policy but also into ecological disaster and human tragedy. We know that nuclear utilities and their federal facilitators would turn our landscape into a radioactive wasteland and that we are on the frontline of a national struggle.

At first glance, this does not bode well for those who have long fought nuclear technology and its corporate owners. The Great Basin, after all, is sparsely populated and its citizens are politically weak. Mostly Mormon, they are inexperienced in the art of grassroots politics. A local joke goes: how many Utahns does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer: five -- one man to pronounce Heavenly Father's will, another to lead prayer while screwing in the bulb, and three women to provide childcare and refreshments. Recently, however, political activists in Utah won a big one, a hinterland victory that has gone mostly unnoticed but should encourage activists everywhere. If a handful of determined citizens can beat the big boys in Utah, we can win anywhere.

Facing a Mobile Chernobyl

Utah and Nevada get it both ways. After enduring the insidious consequences of fallout from a hundred above-ground tests of our atomic arsenal, plus leakage from hundreds of underground nuclear tests, we are now asked to abide the results of the "peaceful atom" as well. Utilities that own nuclear power plants elsewhere in the country have for decades been accumulating the waste stream from Hell. So-called "spent" fuel rods from reactor cores are the most irradiated substances on the planet and, unshielded, can kill the unwary bystander within minutes of exposure. They remain dangerous for 20,000 years. After fifty years of studying what to do with such "high-level" nuclear waste, the federal government has assumed responsibility for imposing a "solution" where there is none. Nevada is slated to get forty years' worth of accumulated spent fuel, now stored near reactors across the nation. A "permanent" repository under construction at Yucca Mountain near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site will be the most expensive taxpayer-funded engineering project in history.

Permanence is a dicey concept out here. Yucca is not as safe as an easterner might suspect. The desert only appears static. We live in a dynamic landscape where the earth cracks and shifts suddenly and unimpeded winds lift dust into the jet stream. As Mount St. Helen showed in 1980, even supposedly dormant volcanoes sometimes blow and drift eastward.

The feds also promised the nuclear industry that they would facilitate the development of a "temporary" site to park used fuel rods while they await transfer to Yucca Mountain. When they failed to do so, a consortium of several nuclear utilities came up with a Plan B. Calling themselves Private Fuel Storage, they are trying to ship their accumulated spent-fuel rods to a dirt-poor Goshute Indian reservation in Skull Valley, Utah, until the Yucca Mountain facility can be completed in ten years or so. The state of Utah has held PFS off, arguing that the "temporary" site will sooner or later become permanent because an additional twenty or more years down the road, when Yucca Mountain is filled, there will be enough accumulated fuel rods to fill Skull Valley as well, and still leave more in storage around the power plants that generated them.

Far from solving a staggering and intractable problem, Nevada and Utah argue, Yucca Mountain and Skull Valley simply allow that problem to be replicated and compounded again and again. The Great Basin is slated to be used as an enabler for some very toxic collective behaviors. In the meanwhile, all that dangerous high-level nuclear waste will be hauled across watersheds, over aquifers, and through communities -- thousands of shipments vulnerable to terrorist attacks and inevitable accidents along the way. Most will carry the cesium equivalent of more than two hundred Hiroshima-sized bombs. Millions of Americans will be in the path of what critics are calling "Mobile Chernobyl."

But wait, there's more. The nation's nuclear power infrastructure is aging and must be rebuilt if nuclear power is to continue. Since it is no longer possible to site a new nuclear power plant anywhere that lobotomy-free citizens live, the industry cannot perform the usual "walk-away-and-let-the-government-clean-up" act it perfected while mining and processing the uranium that is its raw material. No, the old power plants will have to be torn apart and rebuilt in place. The result will be yet more hot and dangerous debris, hundreds of thousands of tons of "low-level" nuclear waste generated by ripping out and rebuilding that infrastructure. Low-level radioactive waste comes in three alphabetic categories: A, B, and C. B and C wastes are the hottest and most problematic. Previous attempts to isolate and store such wastes failed badly in wet climes like South Carolina. After all, radioactive materials migrate easily once they reach water. To upgrade and go on, nuclear utilities desperately need a dry rug to sweep their hot debris under, so our desert lands are now targeted.

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