Caliente split by proposed nuclear railroad

CALIENTE, Nev. - Mayor Kevin Phillips echoes the city's welcome sign - "Prepared For Your Business" - as he watches a four-locomotive freight train rumble past his hardware store on rails that may decide the community's future.

Phillips imagines his tiny central Nevada town as the railhead and transfer station for the nation's radioactive waste being shipped to a proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.

"I want to face reality," he said. "It's going to happen. Here sitteth the Union Pacific Railroad. Here cometh the shipments."

Caliente, with just 1,184 residents, sits in a notch of the rugged Delamar Mountains, not far from the Utah state line. It's 275 miles to Salt Lake City and 150 miles to Las Vegas, but worlds away from the growing cities of the West.

While the rest of Nevada saw a booming 50 percent increase in jobs from 1993 to 2003, state figures show Caliente and surrounding Lincoln County reported a sharp 33 percent decline in people working or looking for work.

A railroad to Yucca Mountain would stem the exodus out of town, bringing 100 construction jobs and about 60 permanent jobs, according to the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"I'm for jobs," the 53-year-old mayor said, "because I know this can be done safely."

Across the tracks from the town's only hardware store, Dorothy Phillips, the mayor's 81-year-old aunt, dismisses assurances that nuclear material can ever be handled without risk.

She remembers her father, Charles Miller, dying of leukemia in 1963 at age 67. He used to scrub dust from trains that passed by the nearby Nevada Test Site after mushroom-cloud explosions. The family received $50,000 in "downwinder" government benefits after he died, she said.

"My sister died of brain cancer," Phillips said, recalling other Caliente families who lost three, four or more members to cancer. "My brother, he was a brakeman on the trains. He died of cancer. I had cancer, but I survived."

Phillips acknowledges jobs are scarce, but she said she doesn't want Caliente becoming Nevada's nuclear waste crossroads.

Like the divided Phillips family and the Union Pacific Railroad tracks that run through town, talk of whether to welcome the nation's nuclear waste splits this everyone-knows-everyone community.

Michelle Wadsworth, 43, said she suspects hazardous chemicals that 2-mile-long freight trains haul unannounced every day past her insurance agency pose a greater danger than strictly regulated and monitored nuclear waste.

Lincoln County Commissioner George Rowe called the nuclear railroad inevitable and said officials should lobby the federal government for money for much-needed public projects.

His brother, Steve Rowe - Caliente's fire chief, hospital board chairman and state youth detention center facilities supervisor - said he's confident the town's 25 volunteer firefighters would be trained to handle a radiological mishap, and that some even might be hired full-time.

The 20-bed Grover C. Dils Medical Center would be expanded, he said, maybe doubled, with a special wing for radiation injuries.

"If this goes through, we would have to get more money," Steve Rowe said.

Elizebeth Russell, a second cousin who retired to Caliente after a career teaching school in rural Whitehall, N.Y., said the Energy Department should keep the waste at nuclear plants where it's produced instead of spending a projected $57 billion over the next three decades entombing it at Yucca Mountain.

"But we've got 4,000 people in Lincoln County against the entire country," she said. "We don't stand a chance."

Lincoln County covers an area larger than the state of Vermont, with 98 percent of the land owned by the federal government. Vast tracts of vacant land are leased for ranching and grazing. With most mines closed and many railroad jobs lost to automation, the biggest employers are schools and government.

Caliente, the county's only city, shows some signs of growth along the Union Pacific tracks and U.S. Highway 93, the two-lane road that doubles as Front Street.

A billboard across from the neat, white-spired Mormon church marks the future site of the Meadow Valley Industrial Park, with access to the existing railroad.

Another heralds planned municipal water improvements underwritten by $1.15 million in federal and state grants, plus $4,031 from Lincoln County.

The mayor said those projects aren't related to the nuclear railroad. But he pulls out a copy of the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and points to provisions calling for a host community to receive money for safety, medical, school, social, economic and other services.

Phillips noted that Caliente has been part of the debate about the nation's nuclear waste since Congress passed the act in 1982 and instructed the Energy Department to find a place to bury 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel building up at reactors in 39 states.

In 2002, Congress approved the Yucca Mountain plan - with project administrators still developing plans for getting the highly radioactive waste to the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The Energy Department plans to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this year to license the repository for opening in 2010.

Polls show most Nevada residents oppose storing the nation's nuclear waste, and the state has six lawsuits pending in federal courts against the project.

It might take until 2006 for the Energy Department to select nuclear transportation routes to Nevada, according to Judith Holm, transportation manager for the federal Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

But the department announced last month it intends to build an $880 million railroad across Nevada - a route it dubbed the Caliente corridor - to ship the waste from a point on the main transcontinental Union Pacific Railroad line near Utah to Yucca Mountain, at the western edge of the Nevada Test Site near the California line.

The distance is about 125 air miles. But the 319-mile rail route would loop north around the Test Site and the vast Nellis Air Force Base bombing range, avoiding Las Vegas casinos, 130,000 hotel rooms and 1.6 million residents.

Kevin Phillips foresees a railhead maintenance center near Caliente, and a multimillion-dollar transfer station hoisting radioactive waste casks off rail cars for the trip across the state.

"These are great facilities," said Phillips, now in his 11th year as mayor. "Would we want to have a radiological accident? No. But people can be trained to handle it."

Dorothy Phillips said she'll never be convinced.

"The mayor's my nephew," she said. "Even though I love him as a relative, I'm against him on this nuclear issue. He's shoving this down our throats."

"I think we have to go down fighting," she added, "or we're not true to our families and all we've lost."

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On the Net:

Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov/

Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov/

Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste