“I have been fighting against Yucca Mountain because it threatens the health and security of everyone in our state. The science they’re doing there is incomplete, faulty, and totally unsafe. Yucca Mountain is the worst place in America to store nuclear waste, and that’s why I’m committed to making sure it never happens.”
This quote, spoken by Nevada Senator Harry Reid, is his mission statement in front of the Senate as he puts on a bold face to fight for the rights and protection of the people of Las Vegas. These words ring hollow, however, as the public finds out later that Reid has taken large "donations" from the very organizations he was lobbying against, essentially ending his protest and making the people of Las Vegas realize that they're basically on their own.
“...it was apparent that the original standards for the repository…couldn’t legitimately be met through the science that we were doing. So the Department of Energy basically changed the rules of its science in order to make it easier for the mountain to comply.”
This quote emphasizes the corrupt and crudely pragmatic attitude of the government in their stubborn insistence on building the waste deposit site in Yucca Mountain. Rather than admit that the site isn't suitable for the intended purpose, the Department just changed the standards, painting a façade over the inadequacies because it suits their purposes. Ironically, this doesn't actually make the mountain any safer; it only ensures that the project will be continued, which is neither wise nor safe.
“That summer, after the Senate’s vote approving the Yucca Mountain project, after documents leaked by workers at the Yucca Mountain project showed proof that scientists were falsifying their studies, after my mom moved out of Summerlin to a studio apartment when the job she went to Vegas for disappeared within three months, and after a spate of suicides convinced the County Coroner that the local suicide record would be broken yet again, reports began to appear about strange fish at Lake Mead: genetically mutated, physically deformed, their spines twisted in knots and the females all infertile.”
This quote, taken from one of the last passages in the book about Yucca Mountain, reveals the terrible state of affairs that has become reality in the time since the author took the tour of its facilities. The faked studies demonstrate a desire by those in authority to make Yucca Mountain into a waste deposit no matter the theoretical consequences, and these consequences are no longer theoretical: the wildlife is beginning to become deformed as a result of the radioactive waste. As some biologists said at the time, this deformity could mark "the beginning of the extinction of human beings in Las Vegas."
“In the desert, you come face to face with the vastness of time and space. It’s a place that forces you to confront the insignificance of human life against the backdrop of geological and cosmic scales.”
The quote emphasizes how the vastness and eternal beauty of the desert contrast sharply with the fleeting nature of human existence, forcing people to acknowledge their own smallness in the scheme of cosmic and geological time. With its immense horizons and age-old rock formations, the desert's grandeur emphasizes the slow, unchanging processes of nature and the universe, making human existence appear insignificant and transitory in contrast. The contrast between our fleeting existence and the lasting, vast powers of the natural world is highlighted by this encounter with the scale of nature and the cosmos, which inspires profound philosophical reflection on the meaning and purpose of human life.
