Dead and Buried: The crazy debate over Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste - nuclear waste storage issues - Statistical Data Included

National Review, April 8, 2002 by Jonah Goldberg

The year, by the old a.d. reckoning, is 12,002. But Lothar has no way of knowing that, since Western civilization-and calendars-had gone the way of the dodo thousands of years before his grandfather was born. Lothar is the leader of a tribe looking to settle down and try their hand at agriculture. He has steered well clear of what used to be Las Vegas, because a fearsome people lives there-amidst the ruins of what all assume was a noble civilization, due to the fact that everyone seemed to eat out of one long communal buffet table. Lothar finds a spot in the shadow of a rust-colored low-slung mountain covered with lizards, scrub brush, and rocky soil. The gods have told him through a vision that this arid and desolate solar anvil is the perfect place for his people to start a new life. They dig many wells, but they all come up dry; finally, they find water. They use it for their crops and drinking water.

And here is the news that scientists, environmentalists, and Nevada senator Harry Reid feared ten millennia earlier: By settling down on a spot no human society found acceptable during the last 10,000 years, Lothar and his people will have increased their exposure to radioactivity by less than the amount you or I receive when flying in an airplane for twelve minutes.

Seriously: Critics of constructing a subterranean repository for nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain argue that if the fictional Lothar decides to live in this godforsaken patch of desert 100 centuries from now, he must not be exposed to more radiation per year than you or I receive from a single chest x-ray. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agree: Their minimum standard is for containment of the waste for no less than 10,000 years-at which point, even if the waste did seep into the groundwater and make its way back into the environment, its radioactivity would have decayed enough to be safe.

A little perspective is helpful. The first known city-state, in Mesopotamia, was formed about 5,000 years ago. Human beings switched from their hunter-gatherer existence, it is believed, somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago. The lifetime of the United States, from the Declaration of Independence to the latest Britney Spears album, constitutes 2 percent of that time span. Which is to say: A lot can happen in the next 10,000 years.

"I hope you wore lead underwear," said a blackjack dealer when I told him I had just visited Yucca Mountain. A cab driver in Las Vegas implored me, in his best X-Files stage whisper, to "tell the world" what was going on "out there in the desert."

Critics of Yucca Mountain are fond of saying the site is "just 90 miles from Las Vegas" (though the more hysterical opponents start dropping the number of miles or saying it's "just outside Las Vegas"). But the truth is, Yucca Mountain really is "out there in the desert." Ninety miles of classic desert nothingness separate Yucca Mountain and Las Vegas. You don't pass through miles of suburbs or small towns, just Joshua trees, mountain ranges, the occasional coyote, and-what the hell was that?!

"Those are the Thunderbirds, they practice here," explained my guide as a squadron of F-16s blew by in tight formation. That's another thing you pass on the way to Yucca Mountain: Nellis Air Force Base, the self- described "home of the fighter pilot." Nellis is essentially where the Air Force practices blowing things up and killing things with the flying portion of America's arsenal of democracy. (From everything I've read, they're very good at it.) Nellis is the home of the Air Warfare Center, the Air Force Weapons School, and the international combat- training exercise known as "Red Flag."

I bring this up for two reasons. First, the Thunderbirds were really cool. Second, if you are concerned about terrorists getting their hands on nuclear waste, where would you want to keep it? Option A: Scattered across 39 states, in 131 locations, near dozens of population centers, and accessible by thousands of roads and waterways? Or Option B: Stored neatly in a defensible pile under thousands of feet of rock 30 seconds from a squadron of F-16s and B-52s? Yucca Mountain is already secure from al-Qaeda types because it abuts the highly classified Nevada Test Site, where we have blown up hundreds of atomic bombs. To date, the only way to breach security at such a facility is to make a lavish contribution to Bill Clinton's reelection campaign and, thankfully, that's no longer a likely scenario.

Nevada's leading politicians-including Democratic senator Harry Reid and Republican governor Kenny Guinn-claim that terrorism is an ad hoc, post-9/11 excuse for storing nuclear waste in their state. They're probably right, considering the administration's tendency to see everything through the prism of terrorism. But just because it's convenient doesn't mean it's not valid. People who advocated tightened air defenses on December 6 could hardly be faulted for including Pearl Harbor in their arguments after December 7. Every day, we hear new revelations about how much al-Qaeda wants a "dirty" nuclear bomb.