About a Mountain Read online

  We cheered.

  For what, it was hard to say.

  By then, the afternoon had begun to stretch thin across the valley, and before the sun would disappear I would decide to live in Vegas.

  The winds from the south were blowing palls of white dust, the stock market was low, unemployment rates high, the moon only showing half of itself, and Mars and Jupiter aligned, which isn’t particularly rare, and so there is no explanation for the confluence that night of the Senate vote on Yucca Mountain and the death of a boy who jumped from the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino, a 1,149-foot-high tower in the center of the brown desert valley.

  This was around the time the city council in Vegas voted to temporarily ban lap dancing in clubs.

  When archeologists found beneath the parking lot of a bar the world’s oldest bottle of Tabasco brand sauce.

  When a tourist won a game of tic-tac-toe against a chicken.

  When someone beat an old man to death with a brick.

  It was a day of five deaths from two types of cancer, four from heart attacks, three related to stroke.

  It was the day another suicide by gunshot occurred.

  The day another suicide by hanging happened.

  At a record 114 degrees, it also happened to be one of that summer’s hottest days, something that caused the World’s Tallest Thermometer to break, raised the price of bottled water to five dollars for eight ounces, and caused a traffic jam on the north end of the Las Vegas Strip as a tourist family traveled toward downtown Las Vegas, rolled over a broken bottle from a homeless woman’s cart, blew out a back tire, hit a parked car, and stalled outside the entrance of the Stratosphere Hotel when the jack in the back of their rented Dodge Stratus sank into the heat-softened asphalt of the street.

  Some tourists who were there in the traffic jam that night mentioned that they looked up from the crash ahead of them and saw in the sky something fall from the dark, and then through the palms, and then to the city’s pavement. Some said they left their cars to look down at what had fallen. Nine of them gave statements of what they saw to the police.

  I asked permission to read those statements that the witnesses had given.

  I went to the Office of Public Relations to inquire about security at the Stratosphere’s tall tower.

  I went to recess, cafeterias, gym class at five schools, trying to find someone who might have known that dead boy.

  Eventually I’d learn his name, and later what he looked like, and soon enough I would know what kind of car he had been driving, what church he had attended, what girl he liked and what girl liked him, his favorite outfit, favorite movie, favorite restaurant, favorite band, what level belt he held in Tae Kwon Do, what design he had sketched onto the wall of his bedroom—very lightly, in pencil—and later planned to fill in, which drawings of his from art school he is thought to have been particularly proud of, the nickname of his car, the two different nicknames his parents had each given him, his answers to the questions on the last pop quiz he took in school—

  What is good? What is bad? What does “art” mean to you? Now look at the chair on the table in front of you and describe it in literal terms

  —and of which bottle of cologne among the five this boy kept in the medicine cabinet down the hall his small bedroom still smelled, even after his parents had ripped up its carpeting, thrown out its bed, and emptied its closet of everything but his art, by the time I first visited them, three months after his death.

  By then, we had learned in Las Vegas that according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, Senator Harry Reid had accepted over $19,000 in campaign contributions from the American Nuclear Energy Council, the lobbying group that Harry Reid had vowed to fight against.

  He’d taken $4,000 from Science Applications, an engineering firm with a contract at Yucca.

  And he’d received $50,000 from Morrison-Knudsen, a management firm that was bidding at the time on a $3 billion contract at Yucca.

  We would also learn in the Los Angeles Times that the senator’s four sons and his one son-in-law had received $2.5 million in commissions from clients whose interests were served by legislation that Harry Reid had introduced in the U.S. Senate.

  And eventually we would hear about a protest that summer that was organized against Reid by the Western Shoshone Indians, a tribe of native people living outside Las Vegas, claiming that they’d been removed by the government years earlier from 24 million acres that began near the city, stretched north across the state, along the western edge of Utah, surrounding all of Yucca.

  “What this nation needs,” announced President Harry Truman, before removing the Shoshone from their 24 million acres, “is a facility for weapons testing that will ensure the future peace of our nation and its people.”

  Explaining that this weapons testing facility needed to be built on Western Shoshone Land, Harry Truman then turned to a seventy-year-old peace treaty in order to justify it.

  “The said tribes agree,” reads the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863, “that whenever the President of the United States shall deem it expedient for them to abandon the roaming life…he is hereby authorized to make reservations for their use.

  “It is further agreed,” reads the Ruby Valley Treaty, “that the several routes of travel by white men through this country shall be forever free and unobstructed by said tribes…and that military posts may be established by the President…and station houses may be erected for the convenience of pioneers.

  “The parties hereto are also in agreement,” continues the same treaty, “that the Shoshone country may be explored and prospected for gold, and that if mines become discovered they may also be explored, and that agricultural settlements may eventually be established…and ranches formed…and mills erected…and timber taken for use.”

  And, finally, “the tribes hereby acknowledge that they have received from the U.S. government certain provisions and clothing amounting to $2,000,” the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863 concludes, which would suggest to the modern reader, but perhaps not to a mid-nineteenth-century Western Shoshone leader, who may have still been mourning the loss of men in an attack by the U.S. Cavalry just several weeks before, that the 24 million acres at issue in Nevada were in fact already sold, did in fact already belong to the United States government, had in fact already been deemed in the intervening 139 years “worthy of the expedient removal of the Shoshone.”

  “I’m not a lawyer,” said one Shoshone tribe member at the protest that summer, “but I know for sure that if my ancestors had known that a ‘military post’ meant a bombing range, or that an ‘agricultural settlement’ meant a waste dump, and that ‘free and unobstructed’ was really just a code for the total annihilation of my people, then they definitely wouldn’t have signed that fucking stupid treaty.”

  In an admission that the eight tenths of a cent paid by the federal government for each of the Western Shoshone’s 24 million acres was not, in hindsight, a fair market price, the United States Indian Land Claims Commission in 1979 awarded the Western Shoshone Indians $26 million for the land they sold to the government, roughly $1, in other words, for every acre of land.

  Two thousand dollars for every member of the tribe.

  The Shoshone refused this money, however, appealing instead to the Ninth Circuit Court, which eventually ruled in 1994 that payment for an object does not necessarily constitute the sale of that object, and so when the Secretary of the Interior accepted the $26 million on the Western Shoshone’s behalf, he did so against their wishes.

  By that time, however, the $26 million that was left by the Shoshone in an interest-bearing account with the Department of the Interior was worth in excess of $147 million.

  Or $20,000 for every member of the tribe.

  “One hundred forty-seven million dollars is a lot different from $26 million,” said the chairman of the Western Shoshone Land Claims Committee, a group that was formed to convince the tribe that they ought to take the money. “That
money could make a big difference in the lives of our people.”

  “That money would be gone in a year,” said the chairman of the Shoshone National Council, which opposed accepting the money.

  The groups therefore agreed to hold a tribal vote that summer, thus settling the stalemate that had been dividing them for years, and exercising, as one member said, “the last right we still possess as an autonomous Indian nation.”

  But observing them from afar in the meantime that summer, before the vote on Yucca Mountain was scheduled to occur, was Senator Harry Reid, who was quoted as saying in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that “the final distribution of this fund has been languishing for twenty-five years, and the Western Shoshone people should not have to wait any longer for it.”

  That summer, therefore, Harry Reid introduced the Western Shoshone Land Claims Distribution Bill, legislation that eventually passed easily through Congress, won praise from the White House, and automatically delivered checks worth $20,000 to every member of the tribe, thus immediately ending their legal claim to Yucca Mountain, a region that also happened to be important to Barrick Mines, a multi-billion-dollar mining corporation that was a major campaign contributor to Senator Harry Reid, and also the primary shareholder in a new mine near Yucca Mountain—smack in the middle of the Shoshones’ disputed land—a find that rendered that region, by the time of Yucca’s vote, the single most important source for domestically mined gold.

  WHERE

  I went to the Yucca Mountain Information Center at the Village Meadows Mall in order to learn more about the proposed waste facility.

  When I arrived, a long-skirted teacher from Meadows Junior High School was extending a pointer finger and furrowing her brow.

  “We are representing the city of Las Vegas,” the teacher told her forty-five students who were lined up against a wall. “So I don’t want to see a single shenanigan from you.”

  The four dozen students against the wall mumbled Yeah.

  Half of them, the teacher said, were from Accelerated Science. The other half were from a class of Special Education.

  We were all there to catch a bus to the Yucca Mountain site, one of the many tours the project offered Vegas locals.

  “It’s really one of the great perks about living here,” said the teacher.

  The Information Center was opened in 1998 in an effort to help Las Vegas become acquainted with Yucca Mountain. It’s in the middle of a mall, between The Disney Store and Cinnabons, and it has so far served an estimated 94,000 people in the city of Las Vegas.

  RADIATION EXISTS, a diorama inside explains…IN NATURE!

  The center is entirely funded by the Department of Energy, the same department that is heading up the Yucca Mountain project.

  From a corner of the room, an Educational Outreach Specialist named Blair entered the middle of the Information Center, cleared her throat loudly, exclaimed “Okay!” and then gathered us in front of another diorama.

  FACTS, read the banner above the education specialist.

  “Today,” said Blair, “we’re going to talk about misinformation in the Las Vegas media.”

  She invited us to sit down on some large carpeted cubes, and then began to read from a hypothetical article about a hypothetical spill of nuclear waste on a highway.

  “‘No waste was spilled during the accident this morning,’” Blair read from the article as she walked among the cubes, “‘but one bystander was killed when he climbed over an embankment to view what had occurred, subsequently being struck by a car accidentally.’”

  I turned around on my cube to follow Blair as she walked. Behind her was a display called Nuclear Energy is Green!

  “So,” said Blair, “we’re gonna try a fun experiment. I’d like you to break up into groups, and each group will be responsible for writing two different headlines for this hypothetical article. The first one should be a headline that describes the facts of the article—making it clear that no one was hurt because of the waste that was spilled—and then the other one should be a headline that sensationalizes the facts. Do you know what ‘sensationalize’ means? Who watches the local news?”

  School programs such as this are part of the center’s “Science, Society, and Nuclear Waste” curriculum, a set of lessons it developed in order to “help local teachers provide accurate information about Yucca Mountain.” It includes a take-home teacher’s manual with 600 pages of text, sixty-one transparencies, seven DVDs, and even a two-hour online workshop that teachers can take for credit. So far, over 900 manuals have been distributed in Vegas, costing the Department of Energy over $800,000.

  “It’s like an entire course in a box,” said the teacher from Meadows Jr. “When you’re on a tight budget, as so many teachers are, something like this can be an absolute life-saver for us.”

  In fact, the Las Vegas superintendent has recently visited the Information Center in order to investigate the possibility of “increasing the Center’s level of contribution to our district’s curriculum offerings.”

  Yucca Mountain’s influence in Las Vegas public schools became so pronounced by 2006 that U.S. Representative Shelley Berkley introduced an amendment in the House of Representatives that would ban the Department of Energy from using cartoon characters in any of its curricula.

  “The character they call ‘Yucca Mountain Johnny’ looks too friendly,” Berkley complained. “He makes you think that Yucca Mountain is a ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ thing, like Joe Camel did with cigarettes.”

  But as the Department of Energy explained in its defense of the mascot, Yucca Mountain Johnny merely tries to “make more accessible for 5th graders the complex and subtle workings of hydrology, nuclear physics…[and] siliciclastic geodynamics.”

  Or, as another diorama in the center explains, YUCCA MOUNTAIN IS MADE OF ROCK!

  I pressed the PRESS HERE button to learn more about the rock.

  “This makes our own Yucca Mountain range in southwest Nevada an ideal location for nuclear waste storage.”

  “Isolation,” said the recording.

  “Stability,” it said.

  “The guarantee that once it’s filled, Yucca Mountain will keep the waste safe, and cool, and dry.”

  “I was pretty surprised therefore,” said Dr. Victor Gilinsky, a physicist from the California Institute of Technology, testifying before Congress about the Yucca Mountain project, “to find myself standing in the middle of this mountain with water dripping out of it and hitting me in the head.”

  Water, explained Gilinsky, is one of nature’s most corrosive substances. It can crack, crush, carry boulders across the planet.

  “The existence of water anywhere in this mountain,” he said, “will cause corrosion and fissures in the nuclear waste containers, and if that happens the containers could easily start leaking, distributing their contents into the local ecosystem.”

  In fact, in one of the Department of Energy’s own studies on the porousness of Yucca, 63,000 gallons of water were poured over the mountain to see how many years it would take for moisture to reach the level of the proposed repository. The study was ended prematurely, however, when all 63,000 gallons reached the center of the mountain in fewer than three months.

  “It’s so porous,” said Gilinsky, “that this mountain is actually made up of 9 percent water.”

  Once this was made public, the Department of Energy defended Yucca’s failures in such tests by arguing that when the mountain was chosen by Congress in the early 1980s, lawmakers automatically and retroactively lowered any standards for Yucca’s suitability, as if inherently acknowledging the site was not ideal.

  In other words, noted John Bartlett, the former research director for the Yucca Mountain project, “it was apparent that the original standards for the repository…couldn’t legitimately be met through the science that we were doing. So the Department of Energy basically changed the rules of its science in order to make it easier for the mountain to comply.”

  In the fall of 2
000, for example, after Yucca Mountain’s porousness became impossible to ignore, the Department of Energy announced that instead of relying on Yucca’s geology to protect the nuclear waste, the department was developing a new metal shield that would protect the waste inside the mountain from any kind of moisture. This was hailed by the department itself as an “ingenious solution,” a “new evolution in nuclear waste technology,” and a “guaranteed success for centuries to come,” because the shield would be constructed out of what the department called “a new kind of miracle metal.”

  Composed of 6 percent nickel, 22 percent chromium, 13 percent molybdenum, and 3 percent tungsten, “Alloy-22” was hailed by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories—the laboratory that invented it—as “an entirely corrosive-resistant material.”

  A metallurgist commissioned by the Department of Energy testified that “because these waste canisters will now be protected by a shield of Alloy-22, they will enjoy an impenetrable defense against any of Yucca’s dangers.”

  And the Electric Power Research Institute—the company that was hired by the Department of Energy to test the metal’s strength—reported that Alloy-22 “may even have significant resistance to some kinds of magma.”

  However, when reporters requested copies of the documents that proved these claims, the Department of Energy called their studies “nationally sensitive,” and convinced a federal judge to classify them “top secret.”

  “We strongly urge you to reexamine the current design for this repository,” wrote the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a committee that was formed by Congress to monitor Yucca’s progress.

  Based on its own studies, the board believed that the proposed use of Alloy-22 might actually cause moisture inside Yucca Mountain to react with the salinity that’s already in the air, thus forming a kind of acid that might corrode the metal shield.

  But in a letter from the Department of Energy in response to this theory, the board’s concerns were called “flawed,” “extreme,” and “without scientific support.”