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June 7, 2006
Carver sees new RR route as positive
By MARK WAITE
A Warm Springs rancher, however, was not at all happy. DOE wants to study a plan to ship the high-level nuclear waste along existing Union Pacific Railroad tracks along the Interstate 80 corridor to Winnemucca, then down to Hawthorne, where a new rail line would be built south through Mina and near the U.S. Highway 95 corridor. The Caliente corridor would be a route from southeastern Nevada looping around the Nevada Test Site and down along the U.S. Highway 95 corridor. The Hawthorne corridor would travel farther west of communities like Tonopah and Goldfield. The Hawthorne route was one of a handful of options to build a railroad, but it was placed on the back burner in 1991 when members of the Walker River Paiute Tribe were opposed. The DOE said the Walker River Paiute Tribal Council April 13 reversed its policy of refusing to explore the rail route through the reservation. The building of a rail route from Hawthorne would require building 209 miles of track instead of 319 miles from Caliente in southeastern Nevada. The Caliente route is projected to cost $2 billion. "I am so happy about this. It will be the least disruptive and least expensive," Nye County District One Commissioner Roberta "Midge" Carver said. Her district includes wide stretches of northernmost Nye County. Carver said the Caliente route would involve traversing three mountain ranges, cutting into solid rock. "Everywhere they would be going they would be going through a rancher's water," she said. Carver said DOE officials lied to county residents when they said the land withdrawal for the railroad would be only 360,000 acres. In adding up the squares for the land maps showing the land withdrawal, it adds up to 609,000 acres, she said. Allen Benson, director of the office of institutional affairs for the DOE Yucca Mountain Project, said previously the corridor wouldn't include all 640 acres in each section, explaining part of the discrepancy. The Caliente route would go right through 663,000 acres of grazing allotments used by Warm Springs rancher Joe Fellini. He normally grazes about 2,000 head of cattle, but said the numbers are down this year due to the drought. "The way they (DOE) always figure, we're the least amount of people. Let's put it here. Foreign countries reprocess that stuff," Fellini said. "The way they did it was wrong. If they want to run it through here they should've talked to everybody that had property rights," he said. Fellini said the Caliente corridor would cut through 40 miles of land where he has grazing allotments and 17 water sources. "When they proposed the Caliente route they never contacted us. It's unreal. I don't think they should be here. They contaminated so much of our goddam country," Fellini said. His wife Sue Fellini said they hired attorneys after news broke of the Caliente route proposal with a message for the DOE: "We're going to sue your butt the minute you come over that summit!" The Hawthorne route would traverse rail bed for former rail routes, like the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, which was completed in 1907. "I've always been in favor of something other than what they've chosen," Carver said. "The Hawthorne route is more viable, hundreds of miles of rail bed are still intact." Nye County District Two Commissioner Joni Eastley, who represents Tonopah, Beatty, Amargosa Valley and parts of Pahrump, didn't hold out much hope the railroad would boost economies of the small towns along the route. "Hawthorne has a rail yard, an airport and they're still struggling," she said. "The Board of County Commissioners resolved twice to support the Caliente route. I voted with the board to support the Caliente route because it was the best of the options available to us and the Mina route had never been part of the original EIS. "It didn't matter with the Mina route or the Caliente route because they both come past Tonopah. If you're talking a strictly economic or fiscal aspect I never agreed with the Caliente route because of the cost it would take to put it in," Eastley said. But she added, "The reason I am such a proponent of the Mina proposal, it gives the least amount of impact to mining and ranching in this part of the county." When the DOE held an open house in Amargosa Valley in May 2004 to gather input about the Caliente route, Ed Goedhart, manager of the Ponderosa Dairy in Amargosa Valley asked, "Isn't the shortest distance between two points a straight line?" He was referring to the Chalk Mountain corridor, which would've cut right through Nellis Air Force Base. Another possible route under consideration at one time was the Carlin Corridor, from Interstate 80 south. Other routes that were rejected would've connected Yucca Mountain with rail routes along the I-15 corridor via Jean. Jeff Taguchi, a former Nye County Commissioner representing a consulting group, pushed the Hawthorne rail route at the May 2004 open house months after he stepped down from the commission. He pushed for continuing the Hawthorne rail line south to the I-15 corridor instead of a one-way, dead end rail line. "We're talking about economic development. All rail ends at Yucca Mountain which is Nye County. Any rail that dead ends is not a good thing," said Nye County Commissioner Gary Hollis, the county commission's liaison on nuclear waste, "We've always been of the opinion that the rail should be used for dual purposes." Hollis chaired a recent daylong technical workshop on Yucca Mountain in Pahrump at the Community College of Southern Nevada. "There was very little said about the Hawthorne corridor," he said. But Hollis had more of a fatalistic attitude. "I've been hearing rumors for the last year. It's really not up to Nye County, either route goes through Nye County," Hollis said. "It's something we don't have much control over." Back in 2004, Taguchi said it would be disastrous for tourism along U.S. Highway 95 communities if the nuclear waste had to be shipped by truck until the rail route was completed. Members of the Walker River tribe want a study to look at a rail segment traveling through the outskirts of the reservation away from Schurz, the main tribal town at the north end of Walker Lake. The tribe also wants assurances there won't be truck shipments, through the reservation, Tribal Chairwoman Genia Williams told the Las Vegas Review-Journal recently. "It's just too early to tell what DOE is going to do," Hollis said. |
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