letter to the editor:

Murphy’s Law and Yucca Mountain

Sun, Apr 12, 2015 (2:01 a.m.)

The argument by Robert Land and William E. Brown Jr. that “Tourists won’t want to come to a radioactive Las Vegas” (Las Vegas Sun, March 29) centers on an important issue. However, tourists aren’t that bright. Those would be the same tourists who came to Las Vegas to view atomic bomb tests.

A letter to the editor the same day, ”We won’t fall for the Yucca joke,” noted that South Carolina would love to donate nuclear waste stored at our Savannah River Site to Yucca Mountain. All that stored nuclear waste is only 90 miles from Charleston, 150 miles from Myrtle Beach and 80 miles from Savannah, Ga. You would have to look hard in those vacation cities to find a tourist even aware of the nuclear waste, much less one concerned about it.

There are lots of other good arguments against Yucca Mountain. One was in the letter, where the writer noted that “transporting the stuff here can have dire consequences (and we all know Murphy’s Law).” Continuing her South Carolina example, let’s raise the stakes and discuss the most absolutely secure transportation situation: nuclear bombs. In 1958, a B-47 jettisoned a nuclear bomb (probably unarmed) just off the coast of Savannah, and a month later another B-47 accidently dropped an unarmed nuclear bomb on Mars Bluff, S.C. Google the stories; you can’t make this stuff up.

Imagine Murphy’s Law and a load of nuclear waste on its 2,000-mile trip from South Carolina to Yucca Mountain?

The writer is a professor in Clemson University’s Forestry and Environmental Conservation Department.

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