The parking lot outside PNC Park was the scene of an unusual gathering on June 17, as a flat-bed truck carrying a huge dumbbell shaped tank pulled in to park.

The tank was a mock-up of the nuclear waste casks that the government plans to use to carry 17,000 tons of radioactive nuclear wastes from across the country to the Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada. The mock tank is one of eight being hauled around the country by Citizen Alert, the Nevada-based organization that is protesting the government’s plan.

Among speakers at a press conference beside the mock tank were Peter Wray, of the Sierra Club, Myron Aronowitz, and Dr. Dan Fine, speaking for Physicians for Social Responsibility. Fine is also chair of Abolition 2000, the Western Pennsylvania Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

If the government carries out its plan, as many as 5,000 tanks of nuclear wastes will be trucked through Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, Fine warned.

"For the past fifty years," he said, "nuclear activities have been marred by secrecy, false promises, huge cost over-runs, contamination of land, air and water, human illness, and production of huge amounts of dangerous waste, with no proven solution to that problem."

The government’s disposal plan "is fraught with new dangers and unsolved problems," Fine said.

"It will multiply many-fold the potential vulnerable sites of nuclear contamination of people, communities and land — whether by accident or terrorist attacks. Planned dependence on Yucca Mountain, an uncertain, unproved and geologically unstable permanent repository, will require many thousands of truck or rail shipments for the indefinite future, against the will of the people and state of Nevada. It will do nothing to prevent the enlarging pathology of radioactive poisons from the present more than 30 billion curies to triple that amount over the next thirty years."

As a safer alternative to the government’s plan, Fine urged that spent fuel be stored at reactor sites, above ground in dry casks for an extended time, and that generation of new wastes be limited by barring new start-ups, denying license extensions to aging reactors, and earlier shutdown of newer reactors. Nuclear power needs should be reduced by using conservation and alternative clean sustainable energy, Fine said.

Fine cited advice given in 1982 to the U.S Senate by Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy and first all-civilian nuclear power reactor in Shippingport, Pa.

Rickover said, ". . .every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it’s important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it. . ."