Arkansas city says no thanks to interim storage; resident says Yucca Mountain is ‘wasteland’

Officials in Fort Smith, Arkansas on Tuesday unanimously opposed construction of an interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel anywhere near the city.

The seven members of the board all voted in favor of a resolution that the city “opposes the establishment of a facility for the interim storage of spent nuclear fuel materials within or in close proximity to the city limits of the City of Fort Smith.”

Fort Smith is located near the Oklahoma border on the southern banks of the Arkansas River, about 160 miles west by road from the Arkansas capital, Little Rock.

The members of the Fort Smith Board of Directors, and their constituencies, are: Jarred Rego, ward 1; Andre Good, ward 2; Lee Kemp, ward 3; George Catsavis, ward 4; Christina Catsavis, at-large; Kevin Settle, at-large; Neal Martin, at-large.

Also at the board meeting, which was webcast, one Fort Smith resident made false statements about Yucca Mountain, a proposed but unbuilt repository for high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel in Nye County, Nev.

“Eighty-one miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nev., stands Yucca Mountain,” said Patrick McGuire, a Fort Smith resident, at the board’s meeting. “The federal government has been storing … nuclear waste at that mountain since the 1960s. I can’t remember exactly when it was, but it was something like 15, 20 years after they started, they discovered that the waste was leaking out of the containers that they were in.

“Today, Yucca Mountain is a nuclear wasteland,” McGuire said.

Yucca Mountain, which was congressionally authorized in the 1980s, never opened. President Barack Obama (D) suspended the project’s license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2011. There is a test bore at the mountain, but no waste is stored there. The site neighbors the contamination Nevada National Security Site, where the U.S. tested nuclear weapons for decades.