Intersection

[Dump] You should take the waste

Chatting with a GQ writer about burying it in our backyard

Scott Dickensheets

In its March issue, GQ magazine carries a detailed piece on the state of the nuclear-power industry that includes a look at Yucca Mountain. The author of the piece, Wil S. Hylton, spent months visiting the more than 100 sites where radioactive waste is now stored in facilities meant to be temporary. An avowed liberal, Hylton nonetheless concludes that the lefty stigmatizing of nuclear power—an industry with a small carbon footprint—empowers our “suicide pact” with coal and its destructive pollution. The Weekly recently spoke with Hylton.

What did you learn during the reporting of this story?

One thing I learned is that nuclear energy is not a subject you can talk to people about—no matter what their viewpoint is, whether they support it in spite of its obvious dangers or oppose it despite its potential benefits, they want to make sure you instantly agree with them. It’s much more polarizing than I imagined.

Yucca Mountain is not the ideal solution—to take nuclear waste and kind of hide it under the rug. We can’t keep doing that forever. But what we’re doing now [relying on coal] is so preposterously horrible, it’s almost criminal negligence. Nonpartisan studies have shown that 30,000 people a year are dying from the effects of coal pollution. We have to use other options while we wait for all the wonderful wind farms and solar energy. Nuclear energy is something we can do right now. We at least need to discuss it.

What did you think of the attitude in Nevada? That it has some validity or that it’s unprincipled not-in-my-back-yardism?

Well, nimbyism gets a bad rap. It’s okay not to want horrible stuff in your backyard. It’s not unprincipled.

At the same time, if you live in Nevada and oppose Yucca Mountain, you have to at least be honest enough to admit that what you’re really saying is, it’s better for 60 percent of the country to live within 50 miles of nuclear waste [often housed in temporary facilities] than for 1 percent to live 100 miles away from buried waste. And I don’t think that if they lived outside Nevada, they’d feel that way.

They might argue that the people who benefit from nuclear power elsewhere ought to be the ones who assume the risk of the waste.

But since Nevada doesn’t generate enough power on its own to keep Las Vegas cool during the summer, the state imports some of its power from other Southwestern states. Which, guess what, use nuclear plants. So it’s not fair to say Nevada doesn’t benefit from nuclear power.

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