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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

NV Quakes Another Concern for Nuclear Storage at Yucca

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Tuesday, May 27, 2008   

Las Vegas, NV – Opponents of the Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain say recent seismic activity is another good reason to drop the federal government's plan to store nuclear waste there. Nevada has been shaking lately, with earthquakes topping 6.0 on the Richter scale.

This morning, conservationists, Native American tribes and political leaders of both parties will launch a petition drive to say the Department of Energy (DOE) has failed on both legal and technical grounds to show that the nation's nuclear waste can be safely stored in giant casks in the mountain.

Launce Rake with the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) explains the potential effects.

"Yucca Mountain is right in the middle of a very active field of earthquake faults and volcanoes, and the possibility is that we'll have some sort of rupture or spillage of very, very high level, very hot radioactive material that can contaminate groundwater and send radioactive dust hundreds of miles--maybe thousands of miles--across the United States."

The DOE says Yucca Mountain's rock formation provides a stable location that can withstand a "magnitude 6.5 or 7.0 earthquake within a mile or two of the mountain."

But for Larson Bill of the Western Shoshone Defense Project, it's a bad idea to store nuclear waste above the Amargosa Aquifer. The underground lake supplies drinking water for Nevada dairies that provide milk for schoolkids throughout the Southwest.

"If the nuclear waste happens to seep into that groundwater, it's going to be like putting dye in a bowl of water--you know how it goes all over--and it's going to hurt everybody."

Yucca Mountain is within treaty lands of the Western Shoshone Nation. Bill says the federal plan to store nuclear waste goes beyond the rights the Shoshone granted the United States many years ago, and that's another reason DOE should abandon the plan.




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