About a Mountain Read online

  Even a 5,000-year-old city reemerged, the ancient Indian settlement called the “Anasazi Lost City,” a name it didn’t receive because the city had been misplaced, but rather because the city, up until that dry summer, had remained one of the country’s only pre-Columbian listings to be catalogued as “submerged” on the National Register of Historic Places.

  “We may not have a history that’s as deep as other cities,” said a megaphoned voice in Summerlin that day, “and we may not be the biggest in America yet, but ladies and gentlemen do you know what we are?”

  What? yelled the park.

  “We are the city of big spirit!”

  Some dogs barked, the park clapped, Ethan cheered and then he wooed. It was noon and a stilt-walker’s legs were on the ground, heat was sweating lines down the faces of some clowns, dogs were lapping ice cream off the bushes in the park, and the megaphoned voice said: “All right, now, let’s go!”

  Las Vegas was a city, it was suggested that morning, that often came together in community spirit. After all, it had come together in order to watch the old Dunes Hotel be imploded to make way for the lake outside Bellagio. It had come together in order to watch the Landmark, the Aladdin, the Sands, the Hacienda, and the Desert Inn hotels be imploded as well. And it would come together later, in the culmination of the city’s centennial celebrations, in order to watch the implosion of the Stardust Hotel, the oldest remaining casino on the Las Vegas Strip, an event that attracted three TV news copters, two dozen articles in local newspapers, special rates for hotel rooms overlooking the implosion, a six-course Implosion Dinner-for-Two, and 19,462 more people than the 538 Summerlin neighbors who convened that sunny morning in a green bushy park in order to prove that Vegas had community spirit, an effort that they made on behalf of the city, but without the news copters or the dinners-for-two or the 363 extra group huggers that they needed to unseat the current record-holding huggers, the 900 employees of Goldman Sachs in New York.

  WHEN

  I hadn’t planned to stay.

  What I’d planned to do was help my mother find her new home. Help her move in. Get my mom settled.

  But within a couple weeks she took up with a local group of environmental activists, meeting them every other week at a bar near her home called Viva Lost Wages, where they liked to watch C-SPAN.

  I went with her one week to an unscheduled meeting because an e-mail message in boldfaced caps proclaimed the meeting “ESSENTIAL IF YOU LOVE LIVING IN LAS VEGAS!”

  “We are going to watch someone single-handedly save our city,” said the leader of my mom’s group when she and I arrived.

  I looked over and up at C-SPAN.

  The bartender raised the volume on the TV to max.

  There at a podium above the Lost Wages jukebox was the senior senator from Nevada, Democrat Harry Reid.

  “What we are talking about today,” said Democrat Harry Reid, “is the single greatest threat to the future of our nation.”

  “You give ’em hell, Harry!” said the bartender.

  Someone else said, “Yeah!”

  I only knew a little about Harry Reid at that point. I knew that he had just been named by a local weekly paper “Our Favorite Politician in the State of Nevada,” due to what that weekly called his “consistent and quiet decency.” I had also seen Reid at an oil change shop staring hard from the cover of Las Vegas Life magazine, recently having been named “The Most Powerful Man in Our City” because of his “bold willingness to compromise for results.” And even my mom, who seldom trusts anyone, came home from her first meeting with the environmental group to tell me that Harry Reid was “the best hope this city has to stop Yucca Mountain.”

  What’s Yucca Mountain? I asked.

  “Watch,” someone said.

  “Ever since I was elected to Congress,” Reid told his constituents earlier that summer, “I have been fighting against Yucca Mountain because it threatens the health and security of everyone in our state. The science they’re doing there is incomplete, faulty, and totally unsafe. Yucca Mountain is the worst place in America to store nuclear waste, and that’s why I’m committed to making sure it never happens.”

  The idea to store nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain had originated approximately thirty years earlier, during the height of American protests against nuclear energy. To try to change public opinion about nuclear power, the American Nuclear Energy Council, the lobbying organization for the nuclear power industry, suggested to its clients that Americans would be less afraid of nuclear power plants if they could be assured that nuclear waste was being safely stored.

  “This,” said the council, “is what Americans are afraid of…[it’s] not the power that we produce.”

  So in 1980, one year after a nuclear plant overheated at Three Mile Island, the American Nuclear Energy Council began to lobby Congress for legislation that would require that the nuclear waste produced at its clients’ power plants be stored by the federal government at a single national site.

  “Of course, there’s no direct correlation between the dangers that are posed by nuclear waste and those by a nuclear meltdown,” the leader of my mom’s group explained to us at Viva. “I mean, obviously both can kill you, but that’s where the similarities end. The lobbyists were very smart, though. They played to everyone’s fears of anything that was prefixed with the word ‘nuclear.’ So here was the nuclear power lobby—the very cause of America’s nuclear anxieties—explaining in graphic detail the dangers of the byproduct of their very own industry, all in an effort to clear the deck for a whole new kind of threat. It was perverse. But we fell for it. By the time they offered their proposal to store nuclear waste, we were like ‘Thank god! A solution!’ But obviously it was a con. They were just shuffling the problem out of sight.”

  To temporarily shift our attention away from that problem, the American Nuclear Energy Council began a campaign to convince Americans that nuclear energy was “110% safe”—just as long as its waste went elsewhere.

  According to Sara Ginsburg’s analysis in Nuclear Waste Disposal, the American Nuclear Energy Council spent eighteen months lobbying for the disposal of nuclear waste by deploying “scientific truth squads” throughout the House and Senate, offering to “assist” lawmakers as they “sorted through the conflicting facts about nuclear energy and waste.”

  After those tutorials, Representative James Wright, the Speaker of the House, convinced his fellow lawmakers that one of the three sites that had been proposed for the waste—a site that happened to be in his home state of Texas—would not be suitable for nuclear waste storage. Then Representative Tom Foley, the House majority leader, also convinced his colleagues that another of those sites—the one that happened to be in his home state of Washington—couldn’t possibly be suitable for nuclear waste storage.

  So the state of Nevada, the home of the third and only remaining proposed storage site, and the state with the forty-fourth lowest population in the country, did not stand a chance.

  As the spokesperson for the State Department explained at the time, “There are one million people currently living in Nevada, and 245 million people in the other forty-nine states…. Ergo, there are 245 million arguments for sticking it to Nevada, and only one million for putting it somewhere else.”

  On November 22, 1982, Senator James McClure, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced a bill that was written by the American Nuclear Energy Council calling for the disposal of nuclear waste on federal land in Nevada. He pushed his bill through committee in an hour and a half, then sent it to the floor for an expedited vote.

  It arrived there on the evening of December 21, just hours before the Senate recessed for Christmas break.

  Within thirteen minutes, and without a single minute of debate, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was voted into law.

  “I would like to meet the Senator,” said one observer that night, “who can tell us what he thinks is even in this bill.”


  What is in that bill is a plan to dig ninety-seven miles of tunnels into Yucca, spend forty years filling them with 77,000 tons of spent nuclear waste, and then seal the mountain shut until the waste has decomposed. Just ninety miles north of downtown Las Vegas, Yucca Mountain would end up holding at capacity, and if approved, the radiological equivalent of 2 million individual nuclear detonations, about 7 trillion doses of lethal radiation, enough to kill every living resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, four and a half million times over.

  Which is why the crowd in Viva was not drinking very much.

  Why the bartender tried raising the TV’s volume even higher.

  Why the pool balls slowly rolled to quiet thuds against the rails, and the one waitress in Viva whispered quietly to herself as she passed beneath the TV with two trays in a rush: “That’a boy, Harry.”

  Because this was good TV.

  Harry Reid was standing on the floor of the Senate Chamber and saying things like “crazy,” “unconscionable,” and “over my dead body.”

  The vote that day in the U.S. Senate was indeed important for Vegas. It would officially accept or reject a twenty-year-long study on the effectiveness of Yucca as a potential storage facility for America’s nuclear waste.

  Called the Environmental Impact Statement for the Yucca Mountain Project, the report was 65,000 pages long and included thousands of additional references to hundreds of different studies, all hyperlinked conveniently on two compact disks. If printed out and bound for every member of the Senate, the report would have required 52,000 pounds of paper and could have stretched for over a mile and a half, easily filling the entire floor with two and a half feet of paper.

  I didn’t notice that much paper on C-SPAN that day, and neither did I see many senators on laptops.

  Instead, the senators started their debate by discussing whether this document that none of them possessed contained 252 “unresolved scientific issues,” or 293.

  Whether this mattered, or whether it did not.

  Whether the project was considered by scientists “dangerous” or “safe” or “more than safe.”

  Whether an alternative to nuclear waste storage, as reported in an article in Discover magazine—and held up by one senator while on the Senate floor—was “possible” or “impossible,” whether its name is correctly pronounced “pryo-processing” or “pyra-processing,” and whether an aide in the chamber that day would be willing to check that out.

  They discussed its cost of $4 billion.

  They discussed its cost of $7 billion.

  They even discussed its “free price tag to every American taxpayer,” because according to someone in the chamber that day, there was “an enormous private energy fund that has been accruing huge interest since the late 1970s in order to pay for projects just like this,” which, if he were correct, would have rendered the subsequent discussion about Yucca’s projected total cost of “$24 billion” and “$27 billion” and “$38 billion” and “$46 billion” and “$59 billion” and “at least 60 billion” and “100 billion” and “too much” and “we have no other choice” moot.

  But the discussion continued nonetheless.

  They discussed the 1,000 shipments that were estimated to be needed in order to move the waste to Yucca Mountain by barge. And then the 4,000 by barge that would be needed to move the waste.

  The 10,000 by rail, and the 22,000 by rail.

  The 50,000 by truck, and the 100,000 by truck.

  The routes those shipments would have to take past “schools,” “hospitals,” and “nursing homes,” and the routes those shipments would never be taking past “schools,” “hospitals,” and “nursing homes.” As well as the point that one senator made that “we don’t know the routes this waste is going to take, because no official routes have yet been established. So that map that you have there showing all those routes, sir…that…I don’t know where you got that. You should take that off the floor.”

  There was even a moment on C-SPAN when Senator Frank Murkowski, the new ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, stood on the floor of the Senate Chamber and said, “I would remind the Chamber that the Senate today is not, and I repeat not, voting to finalize its authorization for this nuclear waste repository,” at the same time that C-SPAN flashed beneath the senator’s image a graphic that read This resolution authorizes Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for a high-level radioactive waste repository.

  But the most useful demonstration of the confusion that day came in the exchange between Senator Barbara Boxer of California and Senator Harry Reid, during which Senator Boxer, in the midst of a description of the dangerousness of nuclear waste while on the Senate floor, interrupted herself in order to engage Senator Reid in conversation—

  SENATOR BOXER: “This waste is so hot that it has to be cooled for…

  [turned briefly toward aide]

  For how long?…No, I think it’s five months….

  [turned back toward floor]

  Um, I say to my friend from Nevada, Senator Reid…

  Senator Reid?…Um, Senator Reid?”

  SENATOR REID: “Yes, my friend from California?”

  SENATOR BOXER: “Senator Reid, am I correct in saying that this waste is so hot that it has to be cooled down for a very long time, and for how long does it have to be cooled?”

  SENATOR REID: “I will respond to my friend from California by saying that this month National Geographic has a wonderful article on nuclear waste. Among other things, it confirms what we have known for a very long time: that nuclear reactors in America are 97 percent inefficient, which means that when you put a fuel rod in a nuclear reactor and then you take it out, it still has 97 percent of its radioactivity. It’s only used 3 percent! Nuclear reactors are so inefficient that after they’ve been used they have to be put into cold water to cool down, and then they can’t be taken out of that water for at least five years. So I would say to my friend from California, it takes five years.”

  SENATOR BOXER: “Wow! I thank my friend from Nevada. I knew that this waste was so hot that it had to be cooled down for a very long time, but I really wasn’t aware that it was for five years!”

  —which was, as I remember it, the only direct clarification made in the Senate Chamber that day, the only indication of the presence that afternoon of not so much the reassurance of veracity as the reassurance of the performance of the process itself, a promise that—even in the midst of legislation so vast that its effects on the continent would be influencing the continent far longer than the country that produced it would not—the protocol of legislation would not be abandoned, the performative nature of debate would remain, the fact that spent nuclear fuel rods in twenty-first-century American reactors required five years rather than five months to cool down would be noted by stenographers, transcribed and digitized and bound and archived for as long as such a fact was determined to be useful.

  But the 45,000 tons of nuclear waste that await storage in the United States, and the 65,000 tons of nuclear waste that await storage in the United States, and the 47,000 tons of waste that Yucca Mountain is built to hold, and the 70,000 tons of waste that Yucca Mountain is built to hold, and the 10,000 years that the waste will remain dangerous in the mountain, and the 24,000 years that the waste will remain dangerous in the mountain, and the 28 million years that the waste will remain dangerous in the mountain were facts whose life spans were limited that day to that of the debate itself, because, as Senator Larry Craig of Idaho put it, “We don’t really know what the physical capacity of Yucca Mountain is. This amount that we’re all talking about might just be statutory, it might not be physical. Twenty years from now, thirty years from now, I won’t be here, I doubt the senior Senator from Nevada will be here, but on some other day, in some other place, if our needs meet our standards and they are strong and they are stable, remember, a statutory limit can be changed if the politics that can argue a change are there to do so.”

  The politics that were the
re in the Senate Chamber that afternoon settled on a 60 to 39 vote in favor of approving the Yucca Mountain site, a result that had been predicted two weeks earlier by the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C., which revealed that during that summer of the Senate’s vote on Yucca Mountain over $30 million in individual, PAC, and soft money contributions had been distributed by the nuclear power industry to various U.S. senators, including approximately $56,000 to Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, $98,000 to Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, and $109,000 to Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, three of the fifteen Democratic senators who crossed party lines in order to vote in favor of the Yucca Mountain site, and three of the fifteen Democratic senators whose gifts from the nuclear power industry were, on average, twice as high as the gifts that were received by those senators who voted against the project.

  “American Nuclear Insurers, Enron, General Electric, Pacific Gas and Electric, Westinghouse…I could go on and on,” said Senator Harry Reid, just minutes before the vote, reading from a list of what he claimed were the special interest groups that had lobbied for the vote on Yucca Mountain. “These are the people who arrived here today in limousines and Gucci shoes to make sure the vote went through.”

  He looked up at the Senate gallery where the special interest groups were seated.

  “Well go ahead!” he yelled. “Submit your bills, because you’ve done your jobs well. You have perpetrated a travesty on the American people!”

  He threw down his list of special interest groups to the podium, unclipped the microphone from the lapel of his suit, and walked away.