March 20, 2008
Public Lands Committee Told DOE Rail Corridor Study Inadequate

By Dave Maxwell, Staff Writer

Some 30 grazing allotments in Lincoln County and 12 in Nye and Esmeralda Counties will be affected by the Department of Energy (DOE) proposed nuclear waste transportation rail line. The claim was made in prepared remarks by Connie Simkins, Secretary of the N4 Grazing Board, before the Nevada Legislative Committee on Public Lands Meeting in Caliente on March 7.

The N4 Board covers Lincoln, White Pine, the eastern part of Eureka and the northeastern part of Nye Counties.

In her comments, Mrs. Simkins said the N4 Grazing Board has learned that the DOE is setting up an Adaptive Management Program, for the purpose of “getting everyone involved to find out what works, what doesn’t work and make changes along the way.”

She said ranchers in the N4 Grazing District feel their lifetime of knowledge on the range should be involved in all phases of the mitigation: the design, the cost, the performance standards, the mitigations and how they are going to be maintained…It is essential we are involved in every step.”

In the written comments Lincoln County made regarding the Draft EIS for the Caliente Corridor, Jeremy Drew of Resource Concepts noted, “...the DOE seriously underestimated impacts. Many of these impacts were simply not identified…or not explored in adequate depth. Since the impacts were generally classified as small by the DOE, it would stand to reason that the mitigations would also be small.”

Mrs. Simkins said that in 2004, the N4 Board sent a set of 25 questions detailing concerns they had about the rail project. She said the Board was told the questions would be answered in the Draft EIS, finally published in October 2007, but were not. In addition, the Board asked for cooperating agency status in order to be allowed to give input and knowledge into the Draft document. The DOE denied the Board’s request on both counts.

During the public comment period, Joe Fallini of Tonopah said he was very upset when he was told by a Department of Energy official who visited his ranch and viewed some of his wells that would be impacted, that the DOE reserves the right of “eminent domain,” after the official had visited some of the wells on the Fallini ranch. He thought the officials’ comments essentially mean the DOE will just take his land if they want to.

Dr. Mike Baughman, President of Intertech Services, also helping Lincoln County study the impacts, said planned infrastructure for water and power lines in the County would be disrupted by the railroad and significantly raises the cost of construction. He noted the rail corridor “will cross innumerable number of county roads, and otherwise impair access for other public land users including mining, energy, recreation, etc.”

He said the rail corridor will also take out large tracts of wildlife habitat. The mule deer habitat will be significantly impacted, he said, “And we never get more habitats.”

“From the County’s perspective,” Dr. Baughman said, “they believe that all public uses and all public land impacts must be kept whole and perhaps, made better off at the end of the day….in seeing that those impacts are mitigated to the extent practical.”

Dr. Baughman continued by saying there are four venues that the County believes will offer opportunity for mitigation of impacts: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Licensing Application, Nevada Surface Transportation Board Certificate of Conveyance, the Bureau of Land Management Right-of-Way Application, and Securing Commitments for Mitigation from the DOE.

He explained the Department of Energy must receive a license from the NRC to construct and operate the repository at Yucca Mountain. “It is our belief,” Dr. Baughman said, “the NRC and the DOE will seek to limit significantly the scope of issues to be considered in the licensing process to just issues of radiation safety at the Yucca Mountain site itself….a fairly closed-in area.”

Lincoln County intends to argue that since DOE has said the two are equally dependent upon each other, “If you do not have a rail line, you do not have the Yucca Mountain Project. We would believe in pursuing with the NCR that the NCR cannot license the project, if it is rail dependent, without considering the rail facets of the project,” Baughman said.

In ways that Senator Rhoads’ Legislative Committee could be of help, Dr. Baughman asked they consider having staff “research the administrative and legal constraints on the temporary conversion of stock or wildlife water and the transfer thereof from the DOE or grazing permittee or other pertinent entities and report back to the Committee.” Also he asked that the Committee write a letter to the DOE that would include recommending “…every practical effort be made to minimize the projects service area and maintain public access to private lands for our users; that there be no net loss of public land grazing on any allotment impacted by the Caliente rail project; and that the DOE would allow state agencies, affected by the rail line, to participate as cooperating agencies in designing appropriate mitigation measures.”

Connie Simkins also read into the record a formal letter from the N4 Grazing Board on water rights which read in part, “…as responsible stewards of the public lands in White Pine and Lincoln Counties, the question that we must ask is, ‘Is this urban growth so important that we ignore the consequences to the rest of Nevada?’….there has to be better sources of water than drying up the other 16 counties in Nevada. The damage this project will do is not limited to just agriculture and ranching. This water importation project would decimate our ecosystem, our lifestyle, damage the people, wildlife, plants that make Central Nevada their home.”

The letter also asks Senator Rhoads to “support two critically important requests to the State Water Engineer:

• Prior to any interbasin transfer decision by the State Water Engineer, a basin of origin comprehensive water inventory, an analysis of future growth and development potential, and initiation of a long-term monitoring program will be required.
• When water is appropriated or purchased in one basin and then the owner requests a basin transfer and a change in the manner of use, the transferred water rights will be given a position Junior to the historic water rights that remain in the basin.”