Leaky mountain

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, cities, places

This is the Stratosphere in Las Vegas, an observation tower on the same grounds as a 24-storey hotel. At 1,149 feet, it is the tallest observation tower in the US and the second tallest, after the CN Tower in Toronto, in North America. An office tower or two are taller, but this is simply, like the much smaller Space Needle in Seattle, a place to ascend for a look around (and to ride the highest roller coaster in the world).

Why is it there? In a city noted for ephemeral existence, for show over substance, its builder apparently wanted to make a more permanent statement. It has been said that it would cost more to remove it than was spent to build it. In a city where everything gets removed sooner or later (the venerable Sands was imploded long ago), this prediction will probably be tested within the decade, or two at most.

Note: This and the following image were obtained from the Wikipedia Commons.

Ninety miles to the north a low range of mini-mountains stretches across the desert. Yucca Mountain, as a portion of the range is called, was designated some 25 years ago as the site of a nuclear waste repository for the entire nation. Recent news has it that the project is terminated, but there is so far no future direction for the disposal of nuclear waste.

What do these have in common, besides being juxtaposed in one book? That is the reason for the book, About a Mountain by John D'Agata. In 2002 he helped his mother move to Las Vegas, and stayed on for a time himself. While there, he became interested in two mysteries about the place, the suicide of a 16-year-old boy who jumped from the Stratosphere, and the highly polarizing Yucca Mountain.

This is not a work of journalism. Indeed, when on a tour of the Yucca Mountain site he was assembled with "the press", he complained that he was not a reporter. The guide was not concerned, and remarked that he'd be getting a better tour. Reading the book makes it clear, this is an inner journey, and it loops about somewhat like the scary ride attached to the observation deck of the Stratosphere. While the book opens with reports of a birthday parade for the city and of boosterism in favor of Senator Reid, it ends with a detailed timeline of the young man's last hours. In between, they are intertwined.

The book is structured around a reporter's questions: Who What When Where Why and How, but it concludes with three more chapters titled "Why". The message I was left with: the boy's suicide is emblematic of our species' rush to exterminate ourselves. Self-destructiveness seems as built into us as is the survival instinct.

Yucca Mountain has been the focus of enormous amounts of mis- and disinformation from both sides of the debate. We read of this odd explanation being offered to schoolchildren, about "half-life": "Well, think of half life as nature's egg timer ... After the buzzer goes off, the half-life is over and all of the radioactive elements are safe." If only it were so! The author soon points out (via an interviewee's explanation) that after a half-life, half remains, and after another half-life, half of what was left remains, which is a quarter, and so forth. If you start with enough "stuff" to destroy Las Vegas 300,000 times, after 18 half-life periods have elapsed, you have enough left to destroy the city, just once. In other words, still not quite safe!

The author set out to find out why 10,000 years was chosen as the period the repository would be guarded. Five pages on which he was shuttled from one "authority" to another follow. He did find out that the original scientific report had mandated ten million years, but 10,000 was chosen as a more palatable period for political reasons, and either figure is laughably unrealistic anyway.

Question: How do you make a sign whose message will be clear in 12,000 AD? More than a chapter is devoted to this, and to some of the 600+ commissions and committees who are trying to figure it out. An example by a linguist illustrates the problem: We can still read Shakespeare, whose English is but 400 years old. Chaucer, who wrote in what linguists call "Middle English" about 250 years earlier, is quite a bit harder to read. Then another few hundred years back we come to Old English, which only scholars can read. That takes us back less than a thousand years; nine-plus to go.

But 10,000 years ago there were no written languages! The oldest written languages still in use are Chinese and Hebrew, both dating back about 5,000 years (this is not mentioned in the book). And Hebrew would be dead if it had not been restored as a living language by Zionist Jews in the 20^th Century.

My own opinion is that nuclear waste ought to be reprocessed to extract all useful materials and re-purify the U-235 and Pu-239 for producing more energy. The useless stuff, if any there is, should go back in the mine it was extracted from, which kept it safe for millions of years until we dug it up. And to keep the "fuels" out of the hands of terrorists? Guard them, using Blackwater or someone similar, someone with no sense of humor, who are empowered to ensure that the penalty for attempted theft of nuclear materials is a body riddled with M-1 rounds.

The author needed a lot of endurance just to find people who would speak frankly about the flawed science and political compromises behind the choice of Yucca Mountain and the whole subculture of waste disposal it was supposed to create. It required just as much tenacity for the author to determine information about the boy's suicide, and about suicide in Las Vegas. Nobody official will comment, and he had to hire a private investigator to find out a little.

Of course, public statistics (you won't get them from any Nevada governmental agency) show that Las Vegas is the suicide capital of the world. It isn't hard to figure out why: it is a city of losers. To gamble is nearly always to lose. Most visitors can tolerate losing over and over again and keep their mental balance. But gambling attracts addictive personalities, who are not known for stability. Some lose, lose, and then lose hope. Then they jump off a building, or go drown, or use a gun or pills to end it.

The boy was too young to gamble. He wasn't too young to get grounded. It happens to teens every day. For this one, there was an attractive nuisance, if he had the endurance to make his way to the tower, wait in line for a ticket, wait for the elevator, and so forth. It took a few hours. His final trip was pretty short: 833 feet, taking 8 seconds. In this kind of era, with a sharp up-tick in the forces of destruction, will the human race one day find itself taking a short fall to oblivion?