LAS VEGAS - Oct 31, 2006

 

The federal Energy Department on Tuesday scheduled another public meeting on revised plans for a radioactive waste dump in Nevada, while state officials and anti-nuclear advocates complained a first meeting was not informative.

"There was not enough detail to offer an intelligent comment," Martin Malsch, a Vienna, Va.-based lawyer who represents Nevada, said of a meeting Monday in Washington, D.C. "Nobody could have a way to know whether they would be affected or not."

An Energy Department spokesman called the meetings "listening sessions," to collect comments for environmental studies on waste-handling at Yucca Mountain and building a railroad to the site through Lyon, Mineral and Esmeralda counties.

"If someone believes there is not enough information, they should make that one of the comments," said Allen Benson, Energy Department and Yucca Mountain project spokesman in Las Vegas. "We believe we are providing adequate and sufficient information for people to give the kind of input we need to complete these environmental assessments."

Meetings were set this week in Amargosa Valley and Las Vegas, followed by sessions later this month in Caliente, Goldfield, Hawthorne, Fallon. A Nov. 27 meeting has been added in Reno.

The environmental reports are due out next year, Benson said.

Kevin Kamps, spokesman for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, complained that information at the Washington meeting was "scattered."

"We can't talk to each other, we can't hear from each other about concerns," Kamps told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "It think it is by design."

The Energy Department announced earlier this month it was reconsidering building a rail line through western Nevada to Yucca site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The north-south route dubbed the Mina Corridor had been studied in the 1990s but shelved after the Walker River Paiute Indians refused access to their reservation. The tribe reconsidered this year.

The Energy Department had said it favored plans to build a longer east-west rail line from Caliente, near the Utah border, across rural Nevada to the nuclear dump site. The cost of the so-called Caliente Corridor route has been estimated at $2 billion.

There currently is no rail line to the Yucca site, which Congress and the Bush administration picked in 2002 as the place to entomb 77,000 tons of radioactive waste now being stored at nuclear reactors in 39 states. The project has been stalled by funding shortfalls and questions about quality control during site selection.

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On the Net:

Energy Department, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov

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Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com