Hot Asphalt

If you head north from Baker, Calif., on California 127, the first retail business you come to is 56 miles away, in the small southeastern Inyo County town of Shoshone. Set a few feet back from the highway, where it intersects with California 178 to Pahrump, Nev., C’Est Si Bon occupies a converted railroad depot. A small patch of dirt in front has been carved out for some whimsical weather vanes. The porch is painted a lemon yellow, and the glass-paneled door offers a view of the interior with its hardwood floor, potbellied stove and half-dozen tables. With everything from “crepes du jour” to French sodas on the menu, the restaurant is a touch of Gallic sophistication in the Mojave Desert.

David Washum and his wife, Mireille Crete, refugees from Las Vegas, opened C’Est Si Bon last year, realizing a dream of owning their own business. It’s also where they are raising their toddler son, Olivier. “We love this little town,” Mireille says in her thick French-Canadian accent. “We found this little piece of El Dorado here.”

Business has been good, Mireille reports, particularly during the winter and summer, when thousands of tourists pass through Shoshone on their way to and from nearby Death Valley National Park. The only other place to eat in town is the somewhat less cosmopolitan Red Buggy Cafe and Crowbar Saloon, a few hundred feet farther north on 127.

But in business, location is everything. And there’s something troubling about C’Est Si Bon’s location, something that clouds David and Mireille’s dream of an idyllic future: The highway that brings traffic to their business could become California’s busiest transportation corridor for radioactive nuclear waste.

For two years, low-level waste--such as material from medical procedures involving radiation--has been hauled for safe storage at the Nevada Test Site via California 127, which runs from Baker to the Nevada border. But starting next spring, the U.S. Department of Energy plans to ship transuranic waste--potentially far more hazardous--from the test site to be buried deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. With Nevada refusing to let the waste anywhere near Las Vegas, just south of the test site, the shipments would be routed along 127’s lazy loop through California’s Mojave Desert--the first such shipments to travel on California roads since the pilot plant opened in March 1999.

California 127 also would be a likely route for trucks carrying highly radioactive waste from the core of nuclear reactors and weapons if federal agencies approve the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The road, a 90-mile stretch of narrow, two-lane blacktop, features sharp curves and tends to wash out in flash floods. While 127 is among the least busy highways in the state in terms of average daily trips per mile, a large proportion of users are tourists--Death Valley receives 1.2 million visitors a year--unfamiliar with the road’s quirks. “It doesn’t seem like an appropriate route to be shipping hundreds of nuclear waste shipments,” says Barbara Byron, nuclear waste policy advisor at the California Energy Commission.

It’s not new, of course, for isolated rural communities to shoulder the burden of disposing of the nation’s nuclear legacy. Political realities mean that the environmental protests of urban areas carry more weight than those of their country brethren. “Like everybody else, we’d like to say, ‘Not in my backyard,’ ” says Brian Brown, owner of a date farm near Shoshone. “We’d like to see it somewhere else. But there is no best place for it.”

At the same time, the reality for David and Mireille is that nuclear waste trucks could be regularly rumbling past their windows. And if the unthinkable--and according to some, inevitable--happens and an accident causes a radiation leak, the exposure could stretch far beyond their cozy cafe, threatening the isolation and security that the area’s hardy individualists prize. Residents wonder if the government even considered that possibility. “I’m concerned about the survival of the area,” says Marta Becket, owner of the celebrated Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction. “I don’t think the DOE even knows about us. We’re just another entity on 127.”

much of southeastern inyo county, also known as the amargosa Valley, could fit the dictionary definition of desolate--endless vistas of barren scrub and dry lake bed, and a couple of dusty settlements. Only about 1,500 people--a mix of retirees, ranch workers and counterculturalists--live in the area. It’s a four-hour drive from Shoshone to Independence, the Inyo County seat--about the same distance as from Shoshone to Los Angeles. But along California 127, you can spot signs of human life and culture as deeply rooted as the tamarisk trees that mark the winding course of the Amargosa River.

Perched on a plateau just southeast of Shoshone is Tecopa, where hundreds of “snowbirds” park their RVs each winter to take advantage of its famed hot springs. On Shoshone’s commercial strip, the amenities include the two eateries, a convenience store, a motel, a museum and a health center. At the north end of town is Death Valley High School, home of the Scorpions, and the Richard Neutra-designed residence of Susan Sorrells.

Cousins Brian Brown and Sorrells are members of a clan that has been in the Amargosa Valley for four generations, since a mining boom first brought settlers in the early 1900s. Through the Shoshone Development Co., Sorrells and relatives own all of the town’s acreage and operate most of its businesses. (David and Mireille are tenants.) They have invested in catfish ponds, date palms and a purification system for the water supply. They also plan to subdivide some of their land for housing and promote Shoshone as a center for art and geological research. “We have the opportunity to do something special,” says Sorrells, a lanky woman with a girlish laugh.

Sorrells believes the Energy Department sees the Amargosa only as a “wasteland” where “anything goes.” Asked if the idea of trucks hauling transuranic waste through the valley offends her, she responds: “Of course it offends me. That’s a very mild way of putting it. Actually, it outrages me.”

Unlike a nuclear reactor or weapons facility, which at least would create jobs, waste transportation provides no economic benefits to areas it affects. But that’s irrelevant to Sorrells. “Even if it pumps $50 million into the community, I don’t want it,” she says. “It’s bad karma.”

About 28 miles farther north, beside a particularly sharp curve on California 127, you reach the unlikely artistic oasis of Death Valley Junction. Since stumbling on the abandoned recreation hall of the Pacific Borax Co. in 1967, Marta Becket has written, produced and performed musical plays that attract visitors from around the world. The performances--given from October to May--sell out every show, and the theater’s elaborate murals of an audience, painted by Becket herself, have made the building a candidate for landmark status.

“People come out here to follow their dreams,” says the former Broadway dancer, now in her 70s and--with her slender figure, pale complexion and jet-black hair--still capable of turning heads. “Where else could [I] do this? I couldn’t do this in New York.”

Death Valley Junction’s other buildings also belong to Becket, including a two-story home and the Amargosa Hotel, which features a colonnade that has made it a favored movie location. She even lets several wild horses roam around the compound. “I’ve made my life here,” she says. “Everything I love is here.” She winces at the very thought of a nuclear accident. “It’s a nightmare. It would kill it all.”

A final seven-mile stretch gets you to the Nevada border, where California 127 turns into Nevada 373. Only 40 miles from there is a key piece in America’s nuclear puzzle.

longtime amargosa valley residents still remember when the u.s. government conducted atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s. The valley came through unscathed--even though you could hear the detonations from Shoshone. But fallout contaminated downwind communities in Nevada and Utah and fed distrust of the government throughout the region.

Now a new threat sits on a storage pad at the test site. The government has packed 22,000 cubic feet of waste generated during nuclear weapons research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., into 58 steel boxes and 1,637 steel drums. It’s called transuranic waste because it is polluted with man-made materials that have a higher atomic number than uranium, chiefly plutonium. The radioactive material from Livermore includes everything from laboratory clothing and rubber gloves to glassware and solidified waste-water sludge, but the level of radioactivity outside a transport container is so low that it cannot even penetrate human skin. The energy department began transporting it by truck to Nevada in the 1970s, making the last shipment in 1989.

If a human inhales or ingests even a microscopic particle of plutonium from a weapons lab, however, the consequences invariably are lethal. “A very small amount causes fatal lung cancer,” notes Don Hancock, director of the nuclear waste program at the Southwest Research and Information Center, a think tank in Albuquerque, N.M.

Worse, plutonium can be an invisible, undetectable enemy. If particles escape from a shipment, victims might not know for years that they have been contaminated. The radioactive elements in transuranic waste also are long-lived--half of the original amount of a plutonium-239 isotope will remain harmful after 24,000 years.

The Energy Department isn’t taking any chances. For transuranic waste transportation, it only uses teams of two drivers that have undergone more than 400 hours of specialized training. One driver must remain with the vehicle at all times, and the drivers’ every move is tracked by satellite. “It’s safe transportation,” says Ray Anderson, a driver with one of the department’s contracted haulers, CAST Transportation of Denver. “It’s the safest.”

The waste boxes and drums are packaged in a shipping container called a TRUPACT-II, which has withstood test conditions 20 times more severe than the average traffic accident. Among other things, it has been dropped 30 feet onto a concrete pad and burned in jet fuel for 30 minutes at 1,475 degrees. Once the waste gets to the WIPP dump in New Mexico, the material is buried 2,150 feet underground in deep salt beds.

Energy officials say transuranic waste is an unlikely target for terrorists, although low-level shipments to the Nevada Test Site were temporarily suspended in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and the onset of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan. “It wouldn’t have the type of impact terrorists would want,” says Ralph Smith, the department’s manager of institutional programs in Carlsbad, adding that they would find it difficult even to penetrate a TRUPACT and access the waste. But since the terrorist attacks, drivers have been instructed to “pay more attention to their surroundings.”

The first transuranic shipment to WIPP arrived safely from Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., on March 25, 1999. The energy department estimates that the plant, designed to store more than 2 million cubic meters, ultimately will receive more than 37,000 shipments from 10 major federal sites and at least 13 small-quantity sites. Altogether, WIPP-bound trucks traveling the different routes will pass through at least 30 states.

According to Smith, the department has the authority to ship transuranic waste along any route it wishes but prefers to negotiate with the states. Shipments from the Nevada Test Site, originally scheduled to start next month, have been delayed, in part because California has yet to agree to the route. “This route happens to be one of the few on non-interstate roads,” Smith explains.

Officials originally proposed that trucks use U.S. 95 from the test site to Interstate 40 near Needles, Calif., traveling through Las Vegas. That triggered howls of outrage from the gambling mecca. By default, the Amargosa Valley became the “preferred” route. Officials have yet to decide which route the trucks will take after passing through the valley.

The first of 112 truckloads would set off for New Mexico in May; the last is scheduled for 2009. Insists Smith: “We’ve done everything humanly possible to make shipments as safe as we possibly can.”

on an early june afternoon at the longstreet inn casino, about 60 people are gathered around a conference room. They represent a multitude of federal, state and local government agencies--from the Energy Department to Caltrans to the Volunteer Ambulance Service of Beatty, Nev. They have come to this remote border casino on the proposed WIPP shipment route to take part in a “tabletop exercise.” In the parking lot, a truck is available for inspection, with a stainless steel TRUPACT-II container mounted on the trailer bed.

At the session--part of a training program that the Energy Department conducts around the country--the facilitator asks the agency representatives how they would respond to an accident on California 127 just north of Shoshone. A sedan, he hypothesizes, runs the stop sign at the intersection with California 178, forcing a waste truck to leave the road. A delivery van tailgating the truck swipes the sedan and crashes into the rear of the truck. The van’s contents spill all over the road; a TRUPACT-II falls off the trailer.

There’s an air of unreality about the exercise. The only hazardous material released in the collision comes from the van, which just happens to be transporting iodine for medical use; the TRUPACT stays intact. Some of the participants don’t seem to be taking things too seriously, reducing the facilitator at times to the role of a frustrated schoolmaster trying to control an unruly classroom. “It’s all BS anyway,” a Nevada highway patrolman grumbles.

Larry Levy, a swarthy, full-bearded auto mechanic and anti-nuclear activist who has a view of 127 from his mobile home in Tecopa, leaves dissatisfied. The department “can’t admit even to themselves that one of their containers would rupture,” he says. “Their hidden agenda is to convince everyone there’s nothing to worry about.”

But people in the Amargosa Valley are worried. What if, for example, a motor-home driver dozes off at a curve and runs into a transuranic waste truck? “I think it’s inevitable that radioactive waste shippers are going to be involved in accidents,” Levy says.

Sorrells agrees: “I don’t think it’s a question of ‘if’; it’s a question of ‘when.’ ” So far, more than 400 transuranic shipments have arrived safely at the waste isolation plant in New Mexico from other parts of the country. But there have been some glitches, or, as Smith prefers to describe them, “start-up problems.” A patch of radiation contamination was found on the outside of a 55-gallon drum inside a TRUPACT-II shipped from Rocky Flats, Colo., and a shipment got stranded at a New Mexico truck stop during a snowstorm--in bad weather, drivers are supposed to stop at secure areas, such as a military base.

In a bizarre incident, a driver heading for the waste isolation plant last November missed a turn in Santa Fe and illegally headed down Interstate 25 before police turned the truck around. According to the Energy Department, the satellite-monitoring system showed the truck had strayed off course, but those watching the monitors hadn’t noticed. “Has [the program] gone as well as DOE said it was going to go?” asks Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center. “It has not gone as well.”

He also questions the department’s testing of the waste containers. In a particularly remote area, he suggests, a fire could burn for more than 30 minutes before emergency services could respond. “We don’t know whether [a TRUPACT-II] would fail in the case of a serious fire,” he says.

Emergency services in the Amargosa Valley are bare-bones. A single deputy sheriff patrols an area of about 1,200 square miles and, because of budget constraints, is on strict orders not to exceed 40 hours a week. The Southern Inyo Fire Protection District is made up of volunteer firefighters and paramedics and used ambulances--and it may not survive much longer.

With no county support, the district has relied on bake sales and barbecues for funding. Three ballot measures that would have imposed a $30-a-year assessment on local property owners have failed to gain the required two-thirds majority. The district is going to the voters one final time Nov. 6, asking them to make a do-or-die decision. The initiative proposes an assessment that would raise about $75,000 for operating costs for the district. If it doesn’t pass, officials say the district will go out of business Jan. 1.

The nearest emergency response team with radiological training would be at the Nevada Test Site, at least an hour away from Shoshone. “It’s a recipe for disaster,” says Brian Brown, who volunteers as a firefighter-paramedic in addition to running the China Ranch date farm.

The district has no radiological monitoring equipment or protective gear. “I would not be interested” in responding to an accident, says Levy, also a volunteer.

Hancock recommends that the Energy Department solve the problem by providing each shipment to WIPP with an escort of personnel trained to respond to radiological emergencies. But says department manager Smith, the additional costs of such escorts would outweigh the benefits. “The risk level is so low,” he says.

Smith would like to see a solution to the fire district’s problems. But he reaches a matter-of-fact conclusion: “We’re like any interstate shipper. At the end of the day, our job is to ship this stuff. And we’re going to ship it.”

under the energy department’s proposed schedule, construction on the Yucca Mountain repository for high-level nuclear waste would begin in 2005. The department would designate transportation routes in 2006, with shipments scheduled to start in 2007. They would overlap for several years with transuranic shipments from the Nevada Test Site. Trucks carrying low-level waste already pass through Shoshone about three times a week.

The potential build-up of nuclear waste traffic through the Amargosa Valley bothers county and state officials. “You’ve got low-level [waste], you’ve got Yucca Mountain down the line,” says Barbara Byron of the California Energy Commission. “The concern is it’s cumulative, that this corridor is being more and more used by DOE for shipments.” Other remote areas affected by shipments, she notes, don’t have heavy tourist traffic.

In the Amargosa, the possibility of Yucca Mountain shipments is more food for fretting. For now, residents are focusing on the transuranic waste trucks. “They’re not going to stop” in Shoshone, promises Sorrells. “We’ll make darn sure they’re not going to stop. We’re going to have a citizens watch.”

At C’Est Si Bon, Mireille Crete baby-sits her son on a quiet morning and wonders about the future of her family’s desert idyll. One of the reasons they came to Shoshone, she says, is because it would be “so fabulous” to raise Olivier there. “Olivier has as pure an environment as you can get,” she says. One radioactive spill and “all that would be spoiled.”

There’s no hysteria in Mireille’s comments. She realizes that sober political realities have brought nuclear waste to her doorstep. Still, she says, “This is where I live. It’s too close for comfort.” She can’t be convinced about the safety of this volatile, mysterious material.

“Leak-proof, whatever-proof,” she says, gesturing at the highway outside her restaurant, “it’s not good enough for me.’