Word: yucca
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...case of NIMBY writ large, no state wants such a site in its backyard. As the nation's stockpile of spent fuel reached 30,000 tons, activists seized the issue as a way to hobble the industry, and the Energy Department announced that a permanent facility planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada, wouldn't be ready until 2010; Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary now puts its chances of opening at no better than fifty-fifty. Bills to create temporary sites are stalled in both houses of Congress...
...Carver's Big Smoky Valley, occasionally roaring past cars at sagetop altitude. A bank of nuclear-radiation sensors, still religiously monitored, stands outside the county's old courthouse in Tonopah, the county seat. The ultimate metaphor for federal intrusion is the Energy Department's hotly controversial proposal to use Yucca Mountain, in Nye, for the nation's first high-level radioactive-waste dump...
Though just one person died last week vs. 62 in the San Francisco quake, that death was particularly poignant. The parents of Joseph Bishop, 3, had traveled across the U.S. from Newburyport, Mass., to visit the town of Yucca Valley for a high school reunion; the little boy was killed when a fireplace tumbled down on him while he slept. The quake also caused more than 400 injuries and $91 million in property damage, along with widespread power outages and temporary disruptions to local water supplies...