Political leaders in neighboring Nye County have no problems with shipments of radioactive waste being buried at the Nevada National Security Site. Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman vowed to do whatever was necessary to keep the shipments from traveling through her city. At least one counterpart in Nye expresses an opposite position.
“I understand and I understand everybody’s fear and I understand the political grandstanding where they’re going to lay in the road and stop people from coming through,” says Nye County Commissioner Dan Schinhofen, one of five members of the County Commission. “You’re going to be laying there a long time. The secure shipments we don’t know when they’re coming.”
Schinhofen sees the storage of nuclear waste in his county as no big deal.
“As you hear ‘radioactivity’ people think there’s a big cloud,” Schinhofen says. “This is solid material; it’s not liquid; it’s not gaseous.”He does share at least one concern with other Nevada leaders. They all are upset they were kept in the dark about the federal government’s plans.
“The first I heard about this was a press release,” the commissioner said. “Being the host county, that’s kind of insulting.”
The potent uranium waste is being shipped from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to the Area 5 landfill at the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site). The waste was a byproduct of government defense operations. Not all Nye County residents welcome nuclear waste.
“They shouldn’t do it because it will just infect our environment more,” says Anthony Matrese who has lived in Pahrump for nine years.
Others argue nuclear testing and nuclear waste have been Nevada realities for decades.
“Our government is not stupid,” says Sherry Princen. “They got the safeguards. They have everything in line and they’re doing the best to protect us. And they’re moving everything to where it would be the safest to put it but it does have to get from point A to point B.”
Commissioner Schinhofen says his biggest problem with the nuclear waste issue is that most of Nevada’s elected leaders refuse to talk about resuming the project to store commercial nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, also within his county.He’s in favor of opening a national respository for spent nuclear fuel rods at Yucca Mountain because it would be a major boon to the local economy.
