Hazardous Waste Dumps

In a pool of water just a football field away from Lake Michigan, about 1,000 tons of highly radioactive fuel from the scuttled Zion Nuclear Power Station are waiting for someplace else to spend a few thousand years. The wait just got longer. A lot longer. President Obama's proposed budget all but kills the Yucca Mountain project, the controversial Nevada site where the U.S. nuclear industry's spent fuel rods were to spend eternity.

California has the nation's highest concentration of minorities living near hazardous waste facilities, according to a newly released study. Greater Los Angeles tops the nation with 1.2 million people living less than two miles from 17 such facilities, and 91% of them, or 1.1 million, are minorities. Statewide the figure was 81%.

A grim-faced George AuClair Jr. wandered his 25-acre patch of desert looking every inch the broken man. "I'm ashamed of what happened here, but you can't lie about it," said the Torres Martinez tribal member. "You have to own up when you do wrong." Not far away, bulldozers piled up mountains of junk from AuClair's illegal dump, a dump so toxic it has been declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency. He now faces millions of dollars in fines. AuClair's site isn't unusual.

las vegas -- Engineers moved some structures at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump after rock samples indicated a fault line unexpectedly ran beneath their original location, an Energy Department official said Monday. Allen Benson, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy in Las Vegas, said project adjustments were made in June. "In the spring we discovered the true course of the Bow Ridge fault line. As a result we moved locations several hundred feet" to the east, he said.

Henry Williams, a Paiute from Bishop, drove an hour south to a meeting hall to deliver his tribe's verdict on the contested federal plan to bury nuclear waste inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, about 16 miles from the California border. "I am here to speak for my Paiute family," he told a public hearing last week held by the federal government. "We have been here for thousands of years. Our spirits in this area are totally against this."

Roger Nelson has a simple and unequivocal message for the people of the year 12006: Don't dig here. As chief scientist of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Nelson oversees a cavernous salt mine that is the first geological lockbox for the "fiendishly toxic" detritus of nuclear weapons production: chemical sludge, lab gear and filters laced with tons of radioactive plutonium. Nearly half a mile underground, workers push waste drums into crystalline labyrinths that seem as remote as the moon.

Senate Democrats on Thursday accused the Bush administration of withholding key details about toxic waste sites that present risks of exposure to nearby residents. At a congressional hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the Environmental Protection Agency had designated as confidential the details of about 140 Superfund sites where toxic exposure remained uncontrolled.

The Interior Department has rejected a plan to create a nuclear waste stockpile on the Goshute Indians' Skull Valley reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said the decision killed a proposal to store 44,000 tons of spent fuel rods on the reservation. "To me, it's a great day for Utah," Hatch said.

Eight Western states rejected a company's plan to ship tons of radioactive Italian waste to Utah. The states declared that rules don't allow for foreign loads. EnergySolutions is applying for a federal license to import 20,000 tons of waste from four Italian nuclear reactors, with a portion to be buried at its private disposal site in Clive, Utah. But members of the Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management said their rules would need to be changed to allow the waste to be buried there.

Even if no new reactors are built, getting rid of the country's nuclear waste will cost $96.2 billion and require a major expansion of the planned Yucca Mountain waste dump beyond limits imposed by Congress, the Energy Department said in Washington. The government now says the controversial project 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas will cost $38.7 billion more than was anticipated in 2001. Ward Sproat, the official in charge of the federal nuclear waste program, said $16 billion of that increase is pegged to inflation.