Leader Says New Yucca Mountain Report Ignores Impact on Tribe

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A Native American tribal leader says a federal report about underground water contamination from a proposed national nuclear waste dump in the Nevada desert fails to consider people living in the Death Valley area.

George Gholson told the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects on Tuesday that he had expected the projected effects of the Yucca Mountain project would take into account the Timbisha Shoshone and their ancestral lands.

But he says tribal areas are nowhere on the map.

State officials also criticized as technically and legally defective a 301-page environmental study completed last week by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff.

It projects a small risk of contamination over the next million years from radioactivity seeping from tunnels that would be drilled and filled with the nation's spent nuclear reactor fuel.