Letters to the editor, May 25

Other states haveinterest in waste dump

Janice Ayres' piece "Political football at Yucca Mountain" has several inaccuracies. She suggests that the states (plus Nye County) seeking to have licensing completed did so at this time because it is an election year. But actually the suit was brought more than a year ago, but was not "ripe" for an appeals court hearing until the NRC passed its legal deadline to come to a decision without doing so.

Ayres says a question by a judge was a "ruling," but it was just a question.

Ayres said Yucca is "located on an earthquake fault." Actually the block of rock proposed for use is shielded by two capable faults, meaning that earth movements would be absorbed by those faults. It is why over many millions of years this block was left intact.

Ayres also asks: "If it's so great, why aren't other states bidding for it?" In fact, letters of interest in hosting a repository have come to the Department of Energy from several states now, and from one county.

The state of New Mexico has hosted a working deep geologic repository for 13 years now, and waste has traveled there more that 12 million loaded miles with no incidents with radioactive consequences.

New Mexico counts its repository as a positive thing, and in its letter is asking for the science to be done to expand its mission. Other states have apparently heard this success story and want some of this same type of safe and economically advantageous activity.

Abraham Van Luik

Las Vegas

Oil prices down,gas prices up?

Arco (BP) Oil and their gas stations are really amazing, aren't they?

As I go online each day and watch the price of oil drop ... I drive down Highway 395 and watch the prices at the pump go up.

Gasoline prices should be at the very least 20-25 cents a gallon cheaper at the pumps, but Arco continues to raise the prices, not lower them.

Could be they are trying to makeup for their losses over the huge oil spill, cleanup costs and lawsuits and they are passing those costs on to us? In addition to pocketing those huge profits so their great, great, great, great, great grand-children won't ever have to work. They also get to go on numerous vacations around the world each year in their private jets, live in a several-million-dollar mansion or more than one, drive their Rolls-Royce or whatever is chic for their clique these days, and the list goes on and on. And we get the honor of paying for it all. And we aren't expected to say one skeptical thing about it.

Amazing, isn't it?

Curtis Aycock

Carson City