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Posted: 27-04-2002 04:42 Post subject: Now this is classy

http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/04/26/atomic.licenseplates.ap/index.html

Nevada license tags depict atomic blast

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Even as Nevada officials fight against their state becoming the nation's nuclear waste dump, authorities are offering license plates depicting a nuclear blast.

The fund-raising plate, which honors Nevada's atomic past, has been criticized as ill-timed and inappropriate. Others don't mind the idea of cars with mushroom-cloud license plates sharing roads with tractor-trailers hauling radioactive waste.

"Nevada being Nevada, this is a unique subject," said Rick Bibbero, 55, a real estate agent who won $500 with his design for the license tag.

Besides the mushroom cloud, the brown and purple plates show the nucleus-and-atom logo for atomic energy and Albert Einstein's formula for the theory of relativity.

Nuclear testing was conducted above and below ground from 1952 to 1992 at the Nevada Test Site, the federal reservation north of Las Vegas that, at 1,375 square miles, is larger than Rhode Island.

More than 100,000 workers helped develop the nation's nuclear arsenal in Nevada, and more than 800 fell ill for their efforts.

"You wouldn't find California trying to memorialize something like this, but this is our past," said Bibbero, who said he is neutral on the Yucca Mountain project.

Under the Yucca Mountain plan, the federal government will entomb 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste beneath a volcanic ridge 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Kalynda Tilges, of Citizen Alert, an outspoken opponent of nuclear testing and the Yucca Mountain repository, had a word for the license plates: "Abomination."

"If they're talking about the legacy of the Test Site, I don't think they should use a mushroom cloud unless they show what it did to the people who live here and worked out there," Tilges said. "It's not a pretty thing."

State lawmakers approved the plates last year, and the bill's sponsor, Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, said she recalled little opposition.

"This is an important part of Nevada history, and national and international history," said Titus. "I think Nevadans think testing was patriotic. It was done for the good of the country during the Cold War."