The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) originally planned to hold just over a dozen public hearings on its 1999 Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for Yucca Mountain, most of them in Nevada. Only a very few transport corridor States were granted hearings. Public interest organizations, concerned citizens, local elected officials, and Members of Congress pressured DOE to hold nearly two dozen hearings altogether, nearly twice the number originally scheduled, and to hold them in such potentially highly impacted transport corridor communities as: Chicago, IL; Cleveland, OH; St. Louis, MO; Lincoln, NE; and San Bernardino, CA. Despite this, literally hundreds of cities in dozens of transport corridor States were never granted hearings. Most citizens, elected officials, members of the media, and Members of Congress (who will soon vote to approve or disapprove these plans), to this day still do not know that high-level nuclear waste truck and/or train shipments, sometimes in the many thousands, would pass through their community bound for Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
DOE waste transport route maps from the Yucca DEIS have been an important tool for educating the public. These maps were hard won. They were not readily available, not even at several of the public hearings I personally attended around the country. Again, pressure from citizen groups and elected officials was required to force the reluctant DOE to publish the maps on its Yucca Mountain Project web site. These on-line maps became the main way for the public to access the information.
But today, instead of finding maps at the DOE web site, one now finds the attached security notice. Accessing the maps has become much more difficult after the terrorist attacks of September 11 th, 2001. Ironically, in its January 10, 2002 press statement upon Energy Secretary Abraham’s notification to the Governor of Nevada that he would recommend the Yucca Mountain site to the President as early as February 10, 2002, the DOE posted on its web site a map showing the present locations of high-level nuclear waste around the country, but said nothing about the tens of thousands of high-level nuclear waste shipments through 45 States that would be required to move the waste from where it is presently at to Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
How can it be that denying concerned citizens information about nuclear waste transport routes through their community is considered a security risk, while publishing a map showing present waste locations in a bid to bolster the DOE’s Yucca site recommendation is not?
—Kevin Kamps, Nuclear Waste Specialist, NIRS, January 23, 2002
Nuclear Information & Resource Service, 6930 Carroll Avenue, #340, Takoma Park, MD 20912, 301-270-6477, fax 301-270-4291, kevin@nirs.org, www.nirs.org