About a Mountain Read online

  During those forty years, they’ll travel through Chicago every seventeen hours.

  Through St. Louis every fifteen.

  Every thirteen through Denver, every ten through Omaha, every seven through Los Angeles, and every five through Salt Lake City.

  They’ll arrive in Las Vegas in 3,000 yearly truckloads. Two hundred fifty monthly ones, fifty-five weekly ones, eight or nine daily ones. One load every two hours and forty-eight minutes converging with the traffic of Las Vegas, Nevada, at the intersection of Interstates 15 and 80 in an area that is known for exchanges so confusing that commuters simply call it the Las Vegas “spaghetti bowl.”

  From there, the waste will begin the last 100 miles of its journey, a journey that’s been called by the Radioactive Waste Management Associates, a private research firm that conducted a study of the potential routes that this waste would take to Yucca, “the most dangerous hundred miles of the waste’s entire journey.”

  Its report, Worst Case Credible Nuclear Transportation Accidents, is a study that hypothesizes the outcome of an accident with one of the waste transportation trucks headed for Yucca Mountain. The report imagines a day during those four decades of shipments. By then, the number of registered cars in the city of Las Vegas is estimated to be about 2.5 million, approximately one eighth of which will travel through the spaghetti bowl each day, 30,000 during commuter time, 10,000 each hour, or 85 cars every 31 seconds in the ramps and lanes and soft narrow shoulders of the Las Vegas spaghetti bowl highway.

  Eighty-five cars with eighty-five drivers and eighty-five chances of making mistakes. Eighty-five cars that could possibly skid, and eighty-five cars that could possibly roll, and eighty-five cars that might also pile, bunched behind a truck on its way to Yucca Mountain that has somehow flipped, and somehow crashed, and somehow caught on fire.

  According to the Worst Case Credible report, diesel trucks become engulfed in flames when their tanks reach a core temperature of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit, while nuclear waste casks usually become engulfed at 1,732 degrees Fahrenheit, rupturing approximately thirty minutes afterward, and “particularizing their pellets into respirable aerosol,” according to Reexamination of Spent Fuel Shipping Risk Estimates, a study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This means that in such a hypothetical scenario on the spaghetti bowl highway, the city of Las Vegas would have thirty minutes to evacuate the occupants of those eighty-five cars that are jammed around the truck that’s flipped over on the highway.

  However, as is pointed out in the Worst Case Credible report, the Las Vegas spaghetti bowl is an elevated highway and is therefore only accessible by way of its on-ramps. The time it would take for rescue units to reach this accident is estimated to be far longer than for any other location in Vegas.

  Meanwhile, five minutes will have passed on the spaghetti bowl highway, where 630 cars are now jammed around the truck.

  There are also two copters, some rubbernecking drivers, participants in the accident who are honking and milling, two SUV drivers who are starting to fight, a dead driver in the truck, and five more minutes of confusion on the highway—fifteen minutes in all since the accident occurred—where 2,200 more cars are now jammed, blocking access to the accident for the firefighters arriving.

  It’s a scene that stretches roughly 500 feet wide, 300 feet farther than their fire hoses reach.

  The firefighters on the scene will decide to leave their truck, moving on foot with extinguishers on their backs, and ordering the occupants of the many trafficked cars to evacuate their vehicles and run away from the fire, to which all of the occupants in the spaghetti bowl’s cars—an estimated 7,000 people by now—will respond by immediately exiting their cars at the same time that the container ruptures.

  No one on the spaghetti bowl realizes this, though, since the irradiated plume that escapes from the cask is colorless and odorless and leaves the scene on the currents of the traffic copters’ gusts. It drifts with the wind at a rate of ten feet per second, heading east toward the Strip, and the Strip’s largest hotels, less than 2,000 feet from the spaghetti bowl highway. One of these structures, a thirty-two-story hotel of 7,000 guests and 4,000 rooms and 150 million cubic feet of air, begins sucking bits of the irradiated plume through its vents, distributing to its rooms and casinos and kitchens a mixture of diesel and strontium and cesium and iodine and carbon monoxide.

  However, according to the “Las Vegas Hazardous Materials Response Plan,” the hotel’s daytime operations manager will not yet have been contacted by local Vegas officials because the first instruction in the Hazardous Response Plan is that a team of technicians assemble at the scene, determine whether or not radiation has been leaked, establish a perimeter, evacuate civilians, and then, an estimated twenty-five minutes later—or fifty-five minutes after the accident occurred—order local businesses, hospitals, and schools to shut down their external vents.

  When the hotel’s daytime manager finally gets word of this, he’ll turn off the hotel’s exterior intakes, turn on the building’s recycling air fans, and seal into the hotel a mixture of diesel and strontium and cesium and carbon monoxide. At this point, the air that will be hovering outside the hotel will be cleaner than what is inside.

  Three people in the hotel will die immediately of exposure. Within a year, another ninety-four may die from radiation poisoning. Over the following fifty years, an estimated 1,000 guests from the hotel that day could develop some form of cancer.

  Ten days after the accident, the city of Las Vegas will remain closed at its borders. A team of black copters with gamma-ray detectors will fly overhead to evaluate the damage. The level of radiation registering in the city will be 50,000 millirem, 49,000 higher than the EPA allows.

  According to a study by the Sandia National Laboratories entitled Site Restoration: Estimation of Attributable Costs from Plutonium-Dispersal Accidents, a spill such as the one on the spaghetti bowl highway would have “a decontamination factor higher than 10,” which means that it would be more destructive than any other spill that the lab has yet considered, affecting an area of 17 square miles, 700,000 people, and causing $189 billion in damage.

  The study’s evaluation of such a hypothetical spill is that “clean-up would not be possible with today’s present technology.”

  It continues:

  “The only two possibilities for dealing with such a heavily contaminated area are to raze and rebuild the site, or to evacuate it entirely, declaring the area uninhabitable. Under the first scenario, sidewalks, streets, and buildings would have to be removed…while the second scenario involves the permanent quarantine of the heavily contaminated areas, resulting in the relocation of hotels, casinos, places of employment, and residents.”

  “We’d forfeit Las Vegas to the desert,” explained Bob. “The city would no longer exist.”

  But the Department of Energy’s own evaluation of the effects of such a spill are far less pessimistic. In fact, the Department of Energy does not believe that such a spill would even occur. In its own studies for Yucca Mountain, the Department of Energy considered “reasonably foreseeable incidents” during the shipping of its waste to Yucca, but not the “worst case credible” ones. According to the DOE’s estimates, therefore, this would result in a “1-in-10 million” chance that Yucca’s waste will be involved in a serious accident, a probability that’s within acceptable risk limits for large-scale federal projects.

  Yet, when it comes to a place like the city of Las Vegas, where nine deliveries of nuclear waste could be arriving every day, those 1–in–10 million odds over a forty-year period are more accurately represented by a figure of 1–in–27,000 odds, thus making the possibility of a nuclear accident in Vegas higher than the possibility of striking it rich in a casino.

  “It’s dangerous to concentrate so much on probabilities that we forget about possibilities,” Lee Clarke has written. “After all, we all like to believe that chance is in our favor. But chance is also often against us. Things that have neve
r happened before happen all the time.”

  Lee Clarke is a sociologist at Rutgers University who specializes in planning for improbable possibilities.

  “Refusing to keep a proper balance between the probable and the possible can skew our ability to recognize legitimate dangers,” he said. “Catastrophes are common, failures are a part of life. Airplanes crash. Houses explode. More people die in U.S. hospitals every year from medical errors than they do from industrial accidents, car accidents, or AIDS. In the PBS documentary Meltdown at Three Mile Island, the director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that ‘within the NRC no one really thought that you could have a core meltdown. Ours was more of a Titanic mentality. We thought that the plant was so well designed that you couldn’t possibly have major core damage.’ And he was right. The possibility of having all the things that went wrong at Three Mile Island simultaneously happen was very small. But they still happened. And nuclear officials ignored that possibility at our peril. That’s the problem with our modern approach to risk assessment. It’s based on ‘probablistic’ thinking—like what’s the likelihood that this nuclear plant will experience a melt down?—as opposed to worst case credible thinking, which is ‘possibilistic’—what happens if this plant has a really, really bad day?”

  In that case, the steel girder straps on the spaghetti bowl’s ramps would have to be removed, scrubbed, tagged, and then stored indeterminately in a repository all their own.

  Every black span of asphalt would also have to go.

  The green reflective street signs.

  The bolts connecting each sign to the spaghetti bowl’s sides.

  Every nut that secures the bolts.

  Every washer that goes between them.

  Every traffic lamp and bulb and post.

  Every sidewalk square and concrete curb.

  Every newspaper stand.

  Every call girl ad.

  Every chunk of gum, every splotch of gum, every wet and dry and long-gone lugie. Every cigarette butt and crushed-up glass and puddle of vomit and urine and shit. Every blade of grass at the base of the posts of the signs of the Strip’s hotels.

  And every hotel, for that matter.

  All pavilions of lawn and lagoons of light and porte cocheres and driveways. All the heavy wooden stands with the little brassy hooks and the hanging numbered valet tickets.

  The railing of iron you grip up the steps of the indoor and outdoor carpet.

  The hinges of the door and the glass in the panes and the smudges from the hands that touched them.

  And the small chandeliers in the foyer.

  And the large chandeliers in the lobby.

  And the vases of the flowers not fresh anymore on the ledges of CHECK-IN HERE. And the ashtrays etched with the hotel logo, the ballpoint pens with the hotel logo, the notepads stamped with the hotel logo, the sand in the tray on the trashcan covers impressed with the hotel logo.

  The white button UP on the elevator door. The CLOSE DOOR button on the inside door. The black lettered sign in the elevator car for INSPECTION CERTIFICATE ON FILE IN OFFICE.

  The antique table where the elevator stops in the hall with the white marble top.

  The gold-gilded mirror behind it.

  The chair rails nailed along each floor’s hallway, the sconces hanging down each floor’s hallway, the room numbers glued beside each room’s door, the switchplates inside them, the stacks of white towels, the shower caps, sewing kits, emery boards, cotton balls, shoe mitts and Q-tips and combination bottles of conditioning shampoo.

  And all the conditioning shampoo.

  All the body lotions, shower gels, imported milled soaps and eaux de toilette and tissues and bathmats and dryers and irons and toilets and sinks and tiles.

  All 1,987 pages in the local Las Vegas phone book. All 117 million pages in all of that hotel’s phone books. All 928 billion pages inside all the phone books in every nightstand in each of the rooms in all the hotels in the city that must be destroyed.

  Which means “Action Demolition,” and “Amigos Demolition,” and “Budget Demolition,” and “Dirt Man Demolition,” and “Disaster Kleen-Up Vegas,” and “Ned’s City Clearing,” and “Roland’s Excavation,” and “World-Wide Deconstruction,” and “Reconstruction Center,” and “Nature Redefined,” and THE ONE MAN CHOSEN BY CELEBRITIES FAMOUS ATHLETES AND EQUALLY SELECTIVE PEOPLE LIKE YOU DR. JULIO GARCIA THE ONLY COSMETIC SURGEON IN THE CITY OF LAS VEGAS WITH A COLLEGE DEGREE IN ART, and “Body By Biff,” “New Body For You,” the “International Institute of Permanent Cosmetics,” the “Vegas Skin Institute,” “Plastic Surgery Institute,” “Repair Surgery Institute,” THE ONLY PRIVATE INSTITUTE IN THE CITY OF LAS VEGAS THAT SPECIALIZES IN EVERY COSMETIC PROCEDURE and HAVE A FABULOUS FACE and HAVE A SHAPELY BODY and HAVE BEAUTIFUL BREASTS with SAME-DAY EVENING AND WEEKEND APPOINTMENTS and STOP DON’T LOOK FURTHER I’M CUTE AND PETITE and I’M NOT AN ESCORT AGENCY and “Brandy” NOT AN AGENCY and “Aimee” NOT AN AGENCY and “Trevor” NOT AN AGENCY and “Debbi and Dan” DOUBLE DOWN WITH US and IS IT BOB OR IS IT BOBBI and BUY ONE GET ONE EXOTIC DANCERS and LOWEST PRICE DANCERS and WE’LL COME TO YOU and FREE BRUNETTE DANCER WITH EACH ORDERED BLONDE and FULL SERVICE TEENS and TOP DOWN GIRLS and BACK STREET BOYS and THIRD WORLD GIRLS and MATURE MARRIED MOMS and IMPRISONED WITH IVANA and BARELY LEGAL TWINKS and MULATTO COLLEGE CO-ED and JUST OUT OF SCHOOL and JUST HAVING FUN and all drapes and all spreads and all Pringles and pretzels and cashews and gummies and V-8’s and sunblock and vodka and trail mix and facemasks and card decks and terrycloth robes with the hotel logo, and SEALED FOR YOUR POTECTION “safe intimacy kits,” and a copy of Showbiz on every nightstand, and PLACED BY THE GIDEONS inside the nightstand.

  And after all the rooms, the suites.

  And after all of those, the ballrooms.

  And after all the ballrooms, the fitness centers, the late-night kitchens, the laundry rooms, switchboards, future reservations: the pool views, garage views, the mountains in the distance.

  WHY

  I drove with my mom and a friend of hers for an hour north of Vegas, past a dusty new development just emerging from the sand, past a NASCAR racing stadium’s 100,000 empty seats, past a turnoff for what its guidepost called “The Loneliest Highway in America.”

  “Do you see it yet?” asked my mother’s friend, a man named Joshua Abbey.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked.

  Josh pointed straight into the windshield as he drove.

  “The feet should be south, the head toward the north, the arms kinda folded across his chest like a mummy.”

  “Are we looking for a dead guy?” asked my mom through binoculars.

  “Well, sleeping,” Josh said. “Or, yeah…dead. It’s called Mummy Mountain. But I prefer to think he’s sleeping.”

  We drove closer, toward his feet, then spiraled up around them.

  One thousand feet up.

  Two thousand feet up.

  With ski poles and knapsacks, 500 feet by foot.

  Past creosote colonies and giant stands of spruce trees and Joshua saying by way of nothing, “Don’t ask me what anything’s called. My father was into the names of things, but I don’t care about names.”

  “Your father?” asked my mom.

  “Yeah,” Josh replied.

  “Was your dad an activist too?”

  “My father was Edward Abbey.”

  “Your father was Edward Abbey?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t know that?”

  His father, Edward Abbey, moved Joshua and his family to Las Vegas in the sixties, hoping to secure a government job as a welfare case worker. This was before The Monkey Wrench Gang, before Desert Solitaire. It was before the mythology of Edward Abbey had reason to even exist.

  “He was just ‘Dad’ at that point,” Josh said as we climbed. “Or at least he was a good facsimile of one. He was good at being facsimiles.”

  Abbey often claimed on the jackets of his books that he was “born in Home, Pennsylvania” and
that he “lived in Oracle, Arizona.” But neither of those claims was true.

  “He liked the prophetic suggestion of those biographical details,” one biographer wrote. “But of course, it has to be said that there was very often a gap between the rhetoric of Abbey’s writing and the realities of his life.”

  Indeed, the man who was responsible for inspiring a whole generation of environmental activists often left cars to their demise in protected wild preserves, tossed beer cans onto highways, abandoned used tires in pristine National Parks.

  And also, Josh said, he was kind of an asshole.

  Married five times and unfaithful innumerably, Abbey was confronted by his first wife, Josh’s mother, after she learned of an ongoing affair.

  “When my mother asked him about it, he just stood up, grabbed a suitcase, and left without a word. I didn’t see him for another ten years. No child support. No ‘sorry.’ Nothing. Just gone.”

  Josh stepped off the trail and briefly pointed into nothing.

  A single bristlecone pine tree sprouted from a rock.

  Limb-gnarled and orange, crisp-barked and leafless, the bristlecone is the oldest living organism on Earth. It survives millennia longer than anything else around it because it slowly shuts down whole portions of itself, then efficiently sends nutrients to its most crucial parts. It’s not unusual for the only living piece of a bristlecone to be a single green limb thrust out of a hollow trunk.

  “You’d never know that most of these bristlecones are thousands of years older than even redwoods,” said Josh.

  Beyond the tree a haze of heat listed over desert. Fifty wavy miles. Then highway strip. Then miles. Then black-encrusted ridges bumping silently from Earth.

  “So,” Josh said. “What do you think?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of Yucca,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Straight ahead.”