AMARGOSA VALLEY, NEVADA Standing behind the counter at Nevada Joe’s, a gas station and saloon along Highway 95 northwest of Las Vegas, Adrian Goodman explains his decision to move from Los Angeles to the middle of nowhere. “I basically wanted to get as far away as possible from people,” he says. “I moved to Amargosa Valley after I was car-jacked for the third time in L.A. I already had my car stolen several times and I really just wanted to get out of there.” If isolation is his goal, Nye County, Nevada, is the place to be. Though it’s the third largest county in the United States, covering more land than any of our nine smallest states, only 32,000 people (about 1.8 per square mile) call it home. The gas station and the Cherry Patch II, a brothel attached to the back of it, are about a two hour drive from Vegas. Drive straight from the city and you’ll pass an Indian reservation, a prison, a gas station, and an Air Force base. That’s it. The rest is desert, brush, and the dry Nevada breeze. For that reason and many others, the Bush administration, backed by 20 years and nearly $8 billion in studies, has decided that Nye County’s Yucca Mountain would make the best home for the radioactive waste from the nation’s commercial and military nuclear sources. And although editorial pages, public officials, and knowledgeable scientists throughout the country support that decision, Nevada politicians are resisting it, claiming it would drive away tourists and imperil their constituents. “We will fight this dangerous plan in every conceivable way,” says Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman. “We will fight it on Capitol Hill. We will fight it in the heartland. We will fight it in the court of public opinion. We will fight it before the nation’s courts.” Nevada officials have hired a former Senate parliamentarian to devise procedural objections to the plan when that chamber considers it later this spring. They have enlisted the help of top lobbyists from both parties–former White House chiefs of staff John Podesta (Clinton) and Ken Duberstein (Reagan). They have filed dozens of lawsuits. And Goodman vows he will “personally arrest” anyone who brings the waste near Las Vegas. Their opposition is understandable, but they largely dodge an obvious and important point about nuclear energy, which now accounts for a fifth of the country’s energy consumption: The waste must go somewhere. It is currently stored at 131 sites in 39 states across the nation. The status quo is unacceptable–and maybe dangerous. The terrorist attacks last fall have made everyone acutely aware of our vulnerability to additional strikes. Although the doomsday scenarios painted by anti-nuke activists are exaggerated, common sense tells us that we’re better off with highly radioactive waste stored 1,000 feet underground at one heavily-protected remote location–the middle of a barren Nevada desert, for instance–than we are with that same waste in dozens of above-ground pools. Opponents of moving the waste to Yucca Mountain offer a traditional NIMBY–not-in-my-back-yard–argument. A recent poll of Las Vegas residents found that 83 percent opposed bringing the waste to Yucca Mountain. But Vegas is 100 miles away. Those who live closest to the site, and thus stand to be more directly affected by it, are more ambivalent. “From a business aspect, I don’t mind,” says Nevada Joe’s Adrian Goodman, who thinks the increased traffic will mean higher sales. “For families and kids, I’m just not sure. I mean, we want the business, but what if something goes wrong?” When Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham formally recommended the Yucca Mountain site to President Bush on February 14, it was the culmination of a debate that spans decades. On December 14, 1974, Nye County’s largest circulation newspaper, the Pahrump Valley Times, wrote an editorial under the headline “Let’s Be Nuclear Waste Storage Site.” After “extensive examination of various factors” involved in burying the waste nearby, the local paper maintained that “Southern Nevada is the logical choice for the waste disposal. . . . In reality, this nation may only now be on the threshold of the real nuclear era. Nevada should be at the center of it.” In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which called on the Department of Energy to study nine possible sites for permanent disposal of the nation’s accumulating nuclear waste. By 1986, that list had been narrowed to three: Washington, Texas, and Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. While the Nevada site was long thought the most scientifically suitable site for the repository, Washington and Texas were in the running until House Democrats knocked them out. It was no coincidence that legislation in 1987 amending the original bill was pushed hard by Speaker of the House Jim Wright, a Texan, and Majority Leader Tom Foley of Washington. Opponents of the Yucca Mountain project call the 1987 legislation the “Screw Nevada Bill,” and view it with considerable scorn. But others living and working in the area eagerly await the day the bill lives up to that crass designation. The red light above the door of the double-wide trailer attached to the back of Nevada Joe’s is the first indication that this is not a typical “service station.” The sign above the door–“Madame Butterfly’s”–is the second, and the placard on the door is the third: “Public Health Notice: Law requires every brothel prostitute to be tested regularly. Customers must use a latex condom during all sexual activities. This does not guarantee freedom from sexually transmitted diseases.” A middle-aged woman answers the buzzer, and pokes her head out from around the door of the Cherry Patch II. With a coquettish flip of her hair, she asks, “How can I help you?” After I explain that my interest in talking with her is strictly professional–my profession, that is–she smiles and nods as if she’s heard this all before, then buzzes me in. Only when she sees my notebook does she realize that I am serious about just talking. The Cherry Patch II and its sister brothels, the original Cherry Patch Ranch and Mabel’s Whorehouse, are among the handful of businesses closest to Yucca Mountain. Given this proximity, one might expect some resistance to the project from those who work there. Not so. Crystal Mills, the “hostess” at the Cherry Patch II, gladly fleshes out her support of the Yucca Mountain site. “Bring it on,” she says. “I’m all for it.” Mills says she worked with nuclear materials for seven years in Arizona and is familiar with the stringent safety requirements for handling hazardous materials. Her husband works at the site, so not surprisingly she sees the project–expected to bring with it an additional 8,000 to 10,000 jobs–as an economic boon to this relatively poor area. “It’ll create jobs and bring more people to the valley,” explains Mills. And, jerking a thumb toward the dilapidated love shack behind her, she adds, “It’s not going to hurt business here either.” Much of the debate over the Yucca Mountain site turns on what both sides refer to as “the science”–which is to say, the suitability of the site. Having completed, barely, my last science class some 15 years ago, I decide there’s no substitute for personal inspection. A tour is scheduled for 8 A.M., and I wake up late, at 6:30, in my Vegas hotel. This turns out not to be a problem. With the engine of my rented Nissan Altima revving like a weedeater, there’s nothing to slow down for after leaving the city, just mile after mile of landscape that resembles the now-familiar footage of Afghanistan–except the hills of Tora Bora look lush compared with the arid nothingness of Amargosa Valley. The federal government owns 87 percent of the land in Nevada, and much of this part of the state is used by the Department of Energy. You can see Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states, from the top of Yucca Mountain. Only 30 miles or so to the west is Death Valley, the lowest point, where average high temperatures in the summer can reach 115 degrees. To the north lies the Department of Energy’s nuclear test site. The federal government has tested more than 800 nuclear weapons here, so it’s not as if the state doesn’t already play host to plenty of radioactive material. Lots of the mushroom-cloud images that accompanied news footage of the arms race in the 1980s were filmed at the DOE test site. The land here is dotted with puke-green brush that I later learn is called creosote, and the tumbleweed I had always believed to be a Hollywood invention. I spent most of my driving time pondering the bizarre disparity between the abundance of highway litter and the scarcity of humans. It was early. I reach the heavily guarded entrance to the Yucca Mountain facility with 15 minutes to spare. The bus trip to Yucca Mountain from the front gate of the government test site takes another 45 minutes. Upon arriving at the mountain, I’m handed a hard hat, protective goggles, a belt with a flashlight and breathing device, and earplugs. With a handful of other journalists and public officials, I climb aboard a rickety, topless train that looks like a roller coaster, but pushes us at just 8 mph through a hole with a diameter of about 25 feet. The tunnel carved into Yucca Mountain is a horseshoe-shaped excavation about five miles long. We climb off the train two miles into the mountain at another tunnel branching off to the right of the main one. Patrick Rowe, a senior Yucca Mountain engineer, calls this area “Alcove One.” He points to some white spots at the top of the tunnel and explains that “the welded and non-welded volcanic tuff,” together with “zeolites,” would “block or delay the movement of radionuclides” to the “water table.” He glances my way, and I nod earnestly, as if to say, “Of course; everyone knows that.” It is crucial that the site have the greatest possible combination of geological and man-made barriers between the waste and water. One of the main concerns about burying nuclear waste is the potential for the waste to contaminate underground water systems that supply cities and towns in the area. Yucca Mountain, happily, is dry, receiving an average of only 7.5 inches of rain per year, most of which evaporates. In an interview a few days after the tour, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham clarified the research taking place at Alcove One. “We studied what would happen if, at some point in the 10,000-year period [when the waste is dangerous], we had another Ice Age,” he explained. “When the Ice Age ended and the glaciers melted, how far through the rock would the water penetrate?” To do that, the Yucca engineers drilled about 60 feet above the top of the tunnel, and turned on a sprinkler for almost two months. The water penetration was negligible. To do any harm, water would have to seep not 60 feet, but 1,000. Then it would have to get through multi-layered man-made casks–which, needless to say, are built to be impermeable. Finally, the water, supposing it succeeded in entering one of the casks, becoming contaminated, and seeping out again, would have to travel another 800 feet through solid rock before it reached the aquifer below. And all of that assumes the onset of another Ice Age. I’m no scientist, but it seems to me that people living in the Nevada desert during an Ice Age might have bigger things to worry about than the unlikely release of radioactivity half a mile below the surface of the earth. AFTER THE TOUR, I return to Nevada Joe’s, which bills itself as “The Gateway to Death Valley.” Adrian Goodman is there with an older man. Again, I’m the only customer. In most respects, it’s like any other service station, though a bit heavier on the latest alien-fashion paraphernalia. As I work my way past the Martian T-shirts and “Area 51” mesh baseball caps, a simple inquiry about the history of the local alien obsession leads to a lengthy story from the old man. He explains that his father, while cutting hair in nearby Death Valley, once saw the U.S. military bring a spaceship to the desert and was told he’d be killed if he ever told anyone what he’d seen. After a harmless and quite natural follow-up–“Have you seen any aliens?”–he gets frosty. “You’re not a reporter, are you?” he asks. When I confirm his suspicions, he crosses his two index fingers and holds them in front of my face, effectively ending the conversation. Ed Goedhart, who runs the Ponderosa Dairy Farm 12 miles off of Highway 95, is happier to see a reporter. Goedhart employs more than 100 people at that location, and, he says, more than 500 in the area. His cows, he estimates, supply 25 percent of Nevada’s milk. Goedhart is steamed by what he sees as government indifference to the plight of the few people who live closest to the mountain. Standing alongside his huge white Chevy Tahoe on a scorching early-spring afternoon, he ticks off his problems with the project. The science is incomplete. The risk-assessment is optimistic. The government doesn’t have a good track record of being honest about exposing citizens to risk. But he is most frustrated that he has not been contacted by anyone from the federal government about the fate of his farm, should the waste be shipped to Yucca Mountain. “I’ve never had a phone call,” he says. “I’ve never had a visit. I’ve never had a written statement.” The Department of Energy has held 57 public hearings over the years, several of which Goedhart says he attended. A spokesman for the department says that although they did their best to publicize the hearings, few local residents attended. That doesn’t surprise Goedhart, who concedes that among those living in the area around Yucca Mountain, he is in the minority. “I’d say 70 percent of the people in the valley don’t care one way or the other,” he says. “Twenty percent are for it, and the other 10 percent are against it.” Outside of Las Vegas, the strongest voices in opposition to the Yucca Mountain project are in Washington. Nevada, with its four electoral votes and a population of roughly two million, is rarely considered a political power. But when Democrats took over the Senate last June, the state’s senior senator, Harry Reid, became the second-ranking member of the majority. Not coincidentally, within a week, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle appeared at a Las Vegas fund-raiser and declared the Yucca Mountain site “dead.” But last week, Daschle took a step back from those remarks. “I was not aware that this legislation, when we drafted it decades ago, is under an expedited procedure” (which means Daschle can’t kill it singlehanded). Some administration officials believe it’s no coincidence that Daschle’s reversal came within days of a dinner he had with Reid and presidential counselor Karl Rove. Is there a deal in the works? “Harry Reid didn’t get to be the No. 2 Democrat by accident,” a Bush administration official tells me. John Ensign, the state’s Republican senator, who has lately been holding hands with Reid on the issue, jumped on Daschle. “Tom Daschle made a very clear statement that Yucca is dead as long as he’s the majority leader. If Tom Daschle keeps his word, the state of Nevada will not have nuclear waste.” A spokesman for Reid told the Las Vegas Sun that Nevada was relying on Ensign to bring 15 Republicans to the anti-Yucca side. That won’t be easy. After Energy Secretary Abraham formally recommended the site to the president last month, Bush quickly signaled his support, sending the issue to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent body charged with making sure the site meets its safety criteria. Before the NRC can conduct the final evaluation of the site, Nevada governor Kenny Guinn, a Republican and a strong Bush supporter in 2000, can veto the project. But Congress can override Guinn’s veto with majorities in the House and Senate, votes anticipated no later than this summer. The House is expected to pass the measure without much difficulty. But the Senate will be tougher. Yucca Mountain proponents point hopefully to several votes over the past four years that would have permitted temporary storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Twice, pro-Yucca forces came within three votes of passing bills with a two-thirds majority, enough to override a threatened veto from President Clinton. Now they need only a simple majority. That lower threshold and the higher stakes now that national security is understood to be at risk from the current temporary storage system mean that the public relations battle coming over the next several months will be intense. “What a Valentine’s Day gift,” said Las Vegas mayor Goodman, when Abraham gave the site his official blessing on February 14. “Cupid shot nuclear-tipped arrows at the 43 states along the proposed transportation routes. What an expression of love for the country.” Mark Brown, a Las Vegas public relations guru, is in charge of the effort to make the concerns of Nevadans the concerns of America. “We’ve been retained by [Nevada] to go into other states and let people know that should Yucca Mountain [start receiving waste], they can expect 3,000 to 4,000 shipments of nuclear waste [each year] in their state,” he says. “They have no idea, and when they find out, they’re horrified.” Brown starts with a war chest of $7 million from a fund set up by the state to fight the Yucca Mountain project. He plans to wage a traditional political campaign–making news whenever he can, and buying ads when he can’t. “We’re confident that we’ll have the budget to do the job right,” he says. “And we know that significant private contributions are coming.” Brown says the campaign will focus on the transportation of the waste. The shipping technology, he says, is still in development, and there has been no discussion of safety along the proposed route. “We’re not trying to scare people, but these shipments are vulnerable to terrorists and, potentially, spills. This waste isn’t liquid and it’s not going to get into the water, but a spill would have serious health effects,” he argues. “These are 3,000 to 4,000 terrorist targets, and I don’t mean that as a scare tactic.” The Yucca engineers are all over those arguments. The delivery casks are virtually indestructible, they say. One video I saw showed a battery of tests carried out at the Sandia National Laboratories. The tests included smashing an 18-wheeler carrying a cask into a 700-ton brick wall at a speed of 81 mph; dropping a cask from 2,000 feet on hard ground; and, ramming a cask with a 120-ton locomotive train traveling 80 mph. In each case, the scientists at Sandia determined that the casks would not have leaked any radioactive material. “The nuclear industry has already transported waste more than 1.7 million miles and never breached a cask,” says one senior Yucca Mountain scientist. “How’s that for a safety record?” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducts similarly rigorous tests on the casks, and if Congress approves the site, those tests will continue. The NRC will test not only the safety of the casks, but the thousands of other components of the project. “Our position is that there is enough research to meet the standards set by the EPA and the NRC,” says Abraham. “Now, we want the neutral NRC to decide. The people who oppose [Yucca Mountain] don’t even want that. If Congress votes ‘no,’ they’re saying they can make the determination, with whatever their expertise is, rather than letting the NRC make the decision.” Not only that, a no vote would effectively spell the end of the nuclear power industry. Many plants limit the amount of waste they can store on-site before production must stop. Unless the Yucca Mountain facility opens, those days are drawing near. “If we’re not going forward, then everything is over,” says John Kane, senior vice president at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “If the vote is ‘no,’ the people at DOE will put down their pencils and walk away.” THAT’S NOT the outcome that Joe Richards wants. Richards owns the Cherry Patch II, the original Cherry Patch Ranch, and Mabel’s Whorehouse. He’s gung-ho for the Yucca Mountain project. “I hope they send it to us,” he says of the waste. He, too, thinks most valley residents support the project, and he invites me to Crystal to meet some more of them and visit his prostitution museum. The drive takes about 20 minutes, and I pass the time by listening to the only station that comes in on the FM dial, an oldies station out of Pahrump, the closest thing to a town within 45 miles of Yucca Mountain. “Putting more in the air than Area 51, this is KNYE.” As I turn from the main highway onto the two-lane road that will take me to Crystal, the radio blares the opening notes of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On.” The next song is Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” and I almost hit two donkeys that have wandered onto the pavement. By the time I get to Crystal, I’m on dirt road. The town begins with the original Cherry Patch Ranch, and ends maybe 300 yards later with Mabel’s Whorehouse. Each business consists of a main building and an assortment of trailers out back. The space between the two establishments is also dominated by trailers, though these appear to be homes. The museum consists almost entirely of laminated news clippings featuring Joe Richards himself. I enter the saloon to the left of the door to Mabel’s and ask the bartender about some interviews. He returns to tell me that because Joe didn’t leave word that the girls could talk, they won’t. How about him? Do the people he talks to favor bringing waste to Yucca Mountain? “Don’t no one really care,” he says. Stephen F. Hayes is staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
