SALT LAKE CITY, UT Speaking out against 14,000 shipments of deadly atomic waste projected to pass through Utah in coming years, concerned citizens will hold a press conference. The press conference will take place at 3:00 p.m., Thursday, January 13th, 1999 at the Lake City Hilton Inn, just outside the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) public hearing on the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada national nuclear waste dump. The Lake City Hilton Inn is located at 150 West 500 South in Salt Lake City, and the press conference is scheduled during the recess between the morning and evening sessions of the formal hearing.
The press conference will address the dangers of high-level atomic waste transportation and disposal in Utah. The featured speakers will include: Skull Valley Goshutes member Margene Bullcreek from Tooele, a leader of the opposition against the proposed Private Fuel Storage high-level nuclear waste dump targeted at her tribe’s land just west of Salt Lake City; Western Shoshone spiritual elder Corbin Harney, longtime opponent of nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site; Shundahai Network activist Reinard Knudsen from Nevada, organizer against the proposed Yucca Mountain dump; and nuclear waste specialist Kevin Kamps from Nuclear Information & Resource Service in Washington, D.C. Utah “Downwinders,” victims of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site as well as other concerned Utah residents may also speak.
According to a 1995 study by the State of Nevada, over 8,000 train casks and another 6,000+ truck casks would crisscross Utah’s rails and roads, bound for the Yucca Mountain dump. Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates in New York City, who has testified on behalf of the State of Utah against the proposed Skull Valley Goshutes dump site, has calculated that each train cask will hold up to 240 times the long-lived radioactivity released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and each truck cask up to 40 times Hiroshima. Doing the math, that’s over 2 MILLION Hiroshima’s worth of long-lived radioactivity rolling through Utah. Hosting 14,352 of the projected 15,638 shipments bound for Nevada, Utah would thus see over 90% of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste roll across the State. To see the projected routes through Utah, visit the State of Nevada’s web site at http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/states/utah.htm
“The DOE’s own studies have shown how inherently dangerous nuclear waste shipments are to the communities through which they pass,” said Kevin Kamps of NIRS, a national watchdog group. “A 1986 DOE environmental assessment found that the release of even a small fraction of the deadly cargo within just one of these casks could contaminate a 42 square mile area, requiring $620 million and 15 months to clean up. A similar release in an urban setting such as Salt Lake City would be much more costly and take much longer to clean up. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe reveals the futility and bottomless costs of trying to clean up radioactivity once it escapes into the environment. That’s why we call these shipments ‘Mobile Chernobyls’,” Kamps added.
“As the recent Japanese nuclear disaster showed, emergency responders would be on the front line in the event of an accident, and are woefully unprepared and unprotected. Japanese ambulance crews, attempting to rescue fatally injured workers, were themselves seriously contaminated,” said Kamps.
“In addition to accidents, there is the specter of terrorist attack against these shipments,” Kamps said. “Unfortunately, terrorists could target these shipments to try to cause an environmental catastrophe, and the DOE has not adequately addressed this grave concern,” he added.
“Given all this, it’s little wonder that a couple of years ago a New Mexico jury ruled that property owners had suffered decreased property values when the highway next to their land was designated a nuclear waste transport route,” said Kamps.