Coming soon to a place near you ... Nuclear waste by the ton: nuclear waste has been piling up for years. Now there are plains to bury it all in Nevada. But it has to get past your town first.

• Author: Wald, Matthew L.
• Position: National - Cover Story

National

WASHINGTON -- For more than 40 years, nuclear power reactors around the country have been accumulating thousands of tons of radioactive waste. And for almost as long, people have been arguing about where to put it. Finally, this spring, the President and Congress approved a burial site, Yucca Mountain, a volcanic ridge in the Nevada desert about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

But that opened the door to a new problem: How to get it there?

The answer: by truck, train, and barge, on routes near or through thousands of communities. Potential corridors through 44 states and the District of Columbia have already been studied (see map, page 18). The routes will bring the waste within a mile of about 38 million Americans along the way, opponents calculate. Also in that exposed area, they say, are 14,500 schools, the White House, and the U.S. Capitol.

The government says it has made about a thousand nuclear-waste shipments over the years and never had an accident that released radiation. But opponents say that many thousands of shipments will be required with the Yucca Mountain plan; exactly how many will depend on how much can go by train. They say accidents will be inevitable when so much lethal material is moved, and they fear what they call a "mobile Chernobyl"--a reference to the world's worst nuclear accident, the explosion and fire at the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine, in April 1986.

Both sides are at least partly right. With thousands of shipments, there are likely to be accidents. But the comparison to Chernobyl takes some liberties with the facts. Hundreds of square miles of land around Chernobyl had to be abandoned, and will remain so for years to come, because of high radiation. It also appears to have caused cancer in thousands of people living downwind. But fire on that scale is not possible in the U.S. waste shipments, because they involve far less flammable material.

WEAKNESSES IN THE PLAN

Still, opponents have turned a spotlight on two legitimate flaws in the Yucca Mountain plan.

First, it will put millions of people far closer to highly radioactive material than they have ever been. How close? Opponents took a page from the government's Environmental Impact Statement showing possible transportation routes, posted the data at www.mapscience.org, and attached a search engine. Visitors enter their addresses and the page displays a map with the nearest route. It is not clear, however, whether an accident would release any...