Last week I again wrote a column suggesting that Nevadans should hear and listen to BOTH sides of the Yucca Mountain debate. I didn’t advocate for Yucca Mountain; I advocated for open and honest discussion. But that is NOT what Yucca opponents want.
Anytime anyone so much as suggests talking openly about Yucca, the anti-Yucca forces go bonkers and try to shut down the discussion - usually with apocalyptic rhetoric often not grounded in fact and personally attacking the heretic who dares call for debate. So today’s guest column in the Nevada Appeal by Rep. Shelley Berkley which begins, “The recent op-ed (by Chuck Muth) calling on Nevadans to embrace nuclear waste was a little like listening to someone talk about living on Mars with no mention of how you get there from planet Earth,” will come as no surprise.
You can read it HERE, although there’s nothing in it that you haven’t already heard from self-serving politicians over the last two decades. For example, Berkley trots out the ol’ “canisters placed inside the mountain will rapidly corrode, allowing radioactive waste to escape and contaminate drinking water supplies for families living near the proposed dump site.”
This tired old saw is disingenuous at best. Berkley would have you believe that the “canisters” are nothing more than rusted-out old oil drums oozing green liquid waste from under the lid. The waste is actually solid pellets about the size of your thumb, not liquid.
And by the way, there are NO FAMILIES LIVING NEAR YUCCA MOUNTAIN.
Yucca Mountain is a desolate desert area out near the Nuclear Test Site where atomic bombs have been exploded IN THE GROUND. Plus, Yucca is about THREE TIMES as far away from Las Vegas as Baltimore is from Washington, DC. Or if you prefer a West Coast gauge, it’s about as far away as San Diego is from Los Angeles. Indeed, San Francisco is closer to Sacramento than Yucca is to Las Vegas.
Did I mention they used to explode nuclear BOMBS out in this remote, desolate wasteland?
When the opposition has to use misinformation and emotion-driven propaganda, combined with ridicule and character assassination, to shut down even discussion of an issue, what’s that tell you about their position?
And notice that the first time I wrote about opening an honest discussion on Yucca, the opposition responded with an op/ed from the state’s taxpayer-funded anti-Yucca lobbyist/propagandist Bob Loux. This time, however, they trot out a sitting United States congresswoman from Las Vegas. Seems I’ve hit raw nerve. I wonder why these people are so afraid of open and honest debate? What are they hiding? Hmmmm.
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada
No families? My house is approximately 15 miles away from your supposed ground zero for Yucca mountain along with about 3000 other local citizens. That doesn’t even take into account all the local businesses that would affected. There are over 20,000 cows alone in the valley not far away. Are none of these people important enough to be mentioned? I really enjoy your blog and more often than not, agree with you, but your obvious lack of facts on yucca mountain and its surrounding area make me question all your facts in every article you’ve written. I’m quite disappointed. Maybe you should visit that “desolate Wasteland and see how many people actually live there before writing another blog on this subject?
15 miles is a long distance from a nuclear radiation zone. The biggest worry would be groundwater contamination for you folks closer to the site. Time and distance are the big factors when it comes to nuclear radiation. The storage containers that are planned for Yucca are better than the ones currently being used at Nuclear sites and the plans for Yucca include constant monitoring of every cask forever The casks are to be placed inside a leakproof chamber that is monitored also.
I used to work in a Nuclear Power Plant and stood next to the reactor during an outage and was not contaiminated at all. There are a lot of fearmongers out there that will give you half of the facts that bolster thier arguments. That being said I believe Nevada had Yucca shoved down its throat and there should have been at least 2 sites for the waste, one on the east coast and one on the west to shorten the travel required.
I’ve toured the Yucca Mountain facility personally. It’s a desolate wasteland, all right. That’s why the site was selected in the first place.