Word: yucca
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...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...
...where to put such waste when in 1987 it ordered the Department of Energy to focus on building a national dump site in Nevada. By 2003, the Government promised, spent fuel from the country's 110 commercial nuclear reactors would be trundled across states and safely buried deep within Yucca Mountain, an isolated peak about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. But that forecast, like an earlier one predicting a national dump site by 1998, proved too rosy. Last week energy officials pushed back the opening to at least...
Deputy Energy Secretary Henson Moore claims that the revised schedule is necessary to satisfy scientific and environmental concerns. "This is in fact a realistic reappraisal rather than a delay," he says. But to critics, it is yet another sign of bureaucratic bungling. Two years and $500 million into the Yucca project, the federal agency appears to have accomplished little. John Tuck, Under Secretary of Energy, conceded last week that the department did not have a "scientifically sound plan" for assessing the site's suitability as a dump...
Nevada citizens, environmentalists and scientists are adamantly opposed to the Yucca site. They contend that the area is geologically insecure: Lathrop Wells volcano is twelve miles away, and Nevada ranks just behind Alaska and California in frequency of earthquakes. As a result, Nevada has refused to issue the environmental permits needed for a study of the site. The DOE announced last week that it has asked the Justice Department to file suit against the state...