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Earthquakes and the danger of Southern Nevada as a nuclear waste dump site

Quakes Shake Up Nuclear Waste Storage Talk in Nevada, VOA, By Associated Press

July 13, 2019 LAS VEGAS — Recent California earthquakes that rattled Las Vegas have shaken up arguments on both sides of a stalled federal plan to entomb nuclear waste beneath a long-studied site in southern Nevada.

Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso said this week that his legislation to jump-start the process to open the Yucca Mountain project was based on studies that take seismic activity into account, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

Spent nuclear reactor fuel is currently stored at 121 sites in 35 states, and Barrasso, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the earthquakes showed the need to move spent radioactive waste from places where it is currently stored above ground to a more secure repository.

Still supportive

“This doesn’t change my view,” Barrasso said. “We need to find a permanent location for the storage of nuclear waste. I think it’s much safer in Yucca Mountain than in a hundred different locations.”

Nevada officials disagree, and the 6.4 magnitude and 7.1 magnitude tremors over the July Fourth holiday appeared to have bolstered arguments by opponents of the radioactive waste repository.

U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., a longtime Yucca Mountain storage foe, immediately labeled the second shake “yet another reminder of how dangerous it would be to make Nevada the dumping ground for the nation’s nuclear waste.”

U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., said the temblors “highlight the very real dangers” the state would face with nuclear waste storage.

U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, a Democrat whose congressional district includes Yucca Mountain and North Las Vegas, cited a state tally of 621 seismic events greater than magnitude 2.5 within a 50-mile (81-kilometer) radius of Yucca Mountain during the past 43 years.

“Earthquakes can be dangerous enough in their own right. Adding the possibility of a nuclear waste spill in the aftermath is not a risk I am willing to take,” Horsford told the Review-Journal.

Yucca Mountain is about 90 miles (145 kilometers) northwest of the Las Vegas Strip and 108 miles (174 kilometers) east of Ridgecrest, Calif., where the Fourth of July earthquakes originated.

Fourth in seismic activity

A recent state-by-state ranking by the U.S. Geological Survey showed Nevada fourth in seismic activity, behind Alaska, Wyoming and Oklahoma, and just ahead of California. ………. https://www.voanews.com/usa/quakes-shake-nuclear-waste-storage-talk-nevada

July 15, 2019 - Posted by | safety, USA

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