With the Senate poised to vote on whether to allow the transcontinental shipping of nuclear waste for storage in Yucca Mountain, a public interest research group has created a Web site that allows citizens to find out how close their home, work or children’s school is to the path of that radioactive waste.
In Illinois, for example, 1,063 schools will be within 1 mile of rail, barge and highway routes proposed by the Department of Energy. Chicago’s Wrigley Field is 5.7 miles from the nearest path. The White House is 1.1 miles from Union Station, through which shipments are expected to pass on the journey to Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Creators of the site — www.mapscience.org–say Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Mo., and Salt Lake City will become major hubs for containers carrying waste from nuclear power plants that is 200 times more radioactive than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.
`A lot’ through Chicago
“You have a lot of waste coming into the center of Chicago by rail,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, which created the Internet site based on more than 4,000 pages of documents published by the Department of Energy.
Cook and his group say they have not taken a position on whether the Yucca Mountain project is worthwhile, but they insist that the federal government has made it too difficult for ordinary people to learn where the nuclear waste will be traveling.
“The public has no sense that it’s going to go through their neighborhoods and near their kids’ schools,” Cook said.
The site includes information about fatal tractor-trailer wrecks and train crashes near proposed routes. It also includes information about radiation risks and possible terrorist threats to nuclear waste shipments.
The Senate is expected to vote by July 1 on whether to allow the Department of Energy to proceed with storing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain.
Opponents argue that transporting the waste across highways, by barge over the Great Lakes and on railroad tracks would create huge risks for deadly accidents throughout the country.
Perils of status quo
Supporters of the Yucca Mountain project say putting nuclear waste in one location is safer than keeping it at dozens of sites around the country.
“You can’t leave nuclear waste in Illinois and 38 other states where it’s stored temporarily above ground next to schools, rivers, lakes and downtown metropolitan areas,” said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Department of Energy. “It’s just not the smart thing to do in the interest of national security and environmental protection.”
Davis called the Web site a “scare tactic” that ignores a 30-year record of safely transporting spent fuel from nuclear plants around the country. He said people should visit an Energy Department Internet site–www.ymp.gov–for answers to questions about the program.
Davis also denied Cook’s contention that Chicago and other Midwestern cities would become hubs for the radioactive waste.
Ken Johnson, spokesman for Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, discounted the Web site as little more than a public relations attack.
“There are going to be a lot of attempts by the hard-edged environmentalists to try to kill the Yucca Mountain proposal,” Johnson said. “The fact is, we need a nuclear repository. We can’t continue to have this stuff stored on-site. These [nuclear] plants are near homes too.”
Congress voted in 1987 to have the Energy Department study Yucca Mountain as a possible national repository for nuclear waste. If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission grants a license, the site could open by 2010.
President Bush officially approved the site in February. Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, authorized by a federal law to have a say on the siting of the repository, vetoed Bush’s decision.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted 13-10 last week to approve a resolution overturning Guinn’s veto. The House already has approved the resolution.
The next stop is the Senate floor, where opponents of the government proposal acknowledge they are at least 10 votes short of the 51 necessary to block the project.
