Editing Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository (section)

=== Impacts ===
Since the early 1960s, the U.S. has safely conducted more than 3,000 shipments of spent nuclear fuel without any harmful release of radioactive material. This safety record is comparable to the worldwide experience where more than 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel have been transported since 1970 – an amount approximately equal to the total amount of spent nuclear fuel that would have been shipped to Yucca Mountain.<ref name=ocrwm1/>

But cities were still concerned about the transport of radioactive waste on highways and railroads that may have passed through heavily populated areas. Dr. Robert Halstead, a transportation adviser to the state of Nevada since 1988, said of transportation of the high-level waste, "They would heavily affect cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, in the Chicago metropolitan area, in Omaha." "Coming out of the south, the heaviest impacts would be in Atlanta, in Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, moving across through Salt Lake City, through [[downtown Las Vegas]], up to Yucca Mountain. And the same cities would be affected by rail shipments as well." [[Spencer Abraham]] (DOE) said, "I think there's a general understanding that we move hazardous materials in this country, an understanding that the federal government knows how to do it safely."<ref>{{cite web
 | url= https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yucca-mountain-23-10-2003/
 | title= Yucca Mountain: Transporting Nuclear Waste May Put Millions At Risk
 | date= July 25, 2004 |work=[[CBS News]]
 | access-date= May 16, 2008}}</ref>

In October 2018, a state senator from Utah argued that transferring nuclear waste from other states to Yucca Mountain on state highways and railways could be a health hazard.<ref name="Judy Fahys for KUER, 2018">
{{cite web
 |url=https://www.kuer.org/post/utah-legislator-wants-colleagues-support-opposing-yucca-mountain-repository#stream/0
 |title=Utah Legislator Wants Colleagues' Support Opposing Yucca Mountain Repository
 |last=Fahys
 |first=Judy
 |date=October 23, 2018
 |website=kuer.org
 |publisher=[[KUER]]
 |access-date= May 13, 2019
 }}</ref>