Seen from the air, the jagged blue-green shoreline of Maine gleams like a multi-faceted jewel. White sails skim the famed Penobscot Bay with its picturesque harbors and tidy towns like Wiscasset and Damariscotta, "place of many fishes." The air smells of the cold Atlantic, salt marsh, lobster, and cod. On hundreds of islands and promontories the trees rise tall and green. You are about as far from Sierra Blanca, Texas, as you can get.

On Baily Point, in a green cove of the Back River, nestles the tiny nuclear reactor owned by Maine Yankee. As innocent looking as a piece of chocolate, the Maine Yankee reactor is the center of a struggle involving Maine, Vermont, and Texas-where twelve city and nineteen county governments have joined environmental groups and private citizens fighting to keep the two New England states from dumping their radioactive waste in Sierra Blanca.

In a leap of logic as long as the highway from Penobscot Bay to Sierra Blanca, Maine Yankee, and eventually Vermont Yankee, plan to truck their low-level nuclear waste some fifteen hundred miles to bury it forty feet underground in Sierra Blanca (population, 700). The dump increasingly appears to be a done deal; as I write, the House has ratified the Texas-Maine-Vermont Compact, H.R. 629, on October 8 (See "Nuclear Affirmative Action," page 3).

Sierra Blanca, the county seat of Hudspeth County, Texas (population, 2,200), takes its name from a spectral white mountain north of town. The dusty brown colonia at the mountain's base might well be the set for a particularly desolate Sam Shepherd play. No stately trees grow here; the only patch of greenery is the newly irrigated grass on the high school football field. Around the town, for hundreds of miles in all directions, stretches the vast Chihuahuan Desert, populated mostly by deer, mountain lion, javelina, and jaguarundi.

Rising above modest one-story homes, Sierra Blanca's adobe courthouse stands as the city's handsomest public structure. Vacant service stations, derelict restaurants, and body shops line the single commercial street, along with two grocery stores still doing business a few feet from one another. Besides Chona's ice cream parlor, a few gas stations, motels and restaurants, and the bank, the only signs of industry in town are the U.S. Border Patrol office, the Merco sludge dump, and the radioactive waste dump the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority is digging east of town. Like an inverted, hollowed-out Mayan pyramid, the raw trench steps downward into the earth, awaiting the permanent monument of nuclear waste arriving from across the country.

But Sierra Blanca won't stand by in solemn silence while it becomes a radioactive mausoleum. Behind the counter of Guerra and Company, one of the town's two grocery stores, Bill Addington and his mother, Gloria Guerra, hail customers with the latest news from Austin and Washington about the Texas Compact Bill, which will change their lives forever. The phone rings; a reporter is on the line. Pain roughens Bill's voice, makes it gruff. "This is my land, my home," Addington says. "I'll never let them do this. I'm in it to the death."

When I first heard Bill say something like this, two years ago, I thought he was being melodramatic. By now I've learned better. Early in September he called a press conference announcing his hunger strike. Thirty days later and twenty-six pounds lighter, as I write, Bill says he will use his fast to build public awareness, and a strong floor fight in Congress against what he and his neighbors fear is a potential environmental catastrophe.

"I don't have money to hire lawyers or lobbyists like the dump proponents have," he said, his cheeks hollow and his dark eyes feverishly bright. "What I have is what you see. I'm no hero."

Bill is a hero to Gloria, who runs the store while her son is lobbying in Austin, or Washington, or Maine. "Some people are chicken and others aren't," she said. "I'm proud of Billy, but I'm a little worried. Wouldn't you be? The first time I put my hand on his shoulder and felt how bony it was, I got tears in my eyes."

One afternoon in February, Bill drove me to the farm Gloria's father, his grandfather, bought eighty years ago. He pointed out the truck window to Red Light Draw, a shallow depression north of the dirt road. When it rains, Bill said, water in the draw flows south behind the red massif of Eagle Mountain. Bill's seen the arroyo running high with muddy floodwater flowing straight into the Rio Grande. Like many of his neighbors, Bill's afraid that over time, long-lived radionuclides such as iodine and plutonium will leak out of their cement containers-seeping into the sand, the aquifer, and, ultimately, the river, only sixteen miles away.

When he announced his hunger strike, Bill came down hard on elected officials from Texas who have failed to protect their West Texas constituents. "Our border country is in trouble," he said. "Because of our poverty, our remote location, and our racial makeup, we are being targeted for every activity that more affluent, whiter regions find undesirable. It's not foreign invaders who would bring us this waste; it is our own elected representatives."

Many Americans and Mexicans living along the border argue that the Sierra Blanca dump violates the La Paz agreement signed by the United States and Mexico, as well as an executive order issued by President Clinton, prohibiting the targeting of minority communities for hazardous dumps.

Instead of above- or below-ground monitored assured storage (a disposal method used in Canada), Texas has decided to bury its waste in a trench, forty feet underground, where current law and disposal guidelines mandate it must remain for one hundred years. No other states developing disposal compacts will allow this method of "disposal." In choosing Sierra Blanca the state rejected the advice of its own engineering consultants, the firm of Dames and Moore. Hired in the l980s by the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority, D&M found the site geologically unsuitable for a nuclear dump. Since l955, sixty earthquakes registering higher than 5.0 on the Richter Scale have occurred within 200 miles of Sierra Blanca, and precious groundwater underlies the site. Sierra Blanca's unsuitability was confirmed when opponents of the dump hired independent geophysicist Marvin Resnikoff, who found a geologic fault lying under the proposed site.

Since the early 1980s, the state government has spent over $40 million trying to license a dump for low-level nuclear waste (which is not as benign as the compound adjective suggests, and will include much of the irradiated Maine Yankee Nuclear power plant when it is decommissioned). Frustrated by citizens of half a dozen West Texas towns, who hired lawyers to defend their homes, nuclear interests have been spreading some of their wealth around the communities and paying Sierra Blanca townspeople outright to lobby the Texas Legislature and the Congress. Most Sierra Blancans don't talk about the dump any more, and some say they're tired of hearing Bill's diatribes against government and industry advocates of the facility. They point to the new library in town, the green football field, a new ambulance, and a fire truck, all purchased with money the state never spent in Sierra Blanca until it decided to locate a nuclear waste dump there. "Blood money," Bill calls it. "We never got a chance here to hold a referendum on the dump."

Who devised this deal with Maine and Vermont? Democratic Governor Ann Richards was one of its early supporters. Although asserting publicly that a compact with Maine and Vermont would protect Texas from having to accept waste from other states, privately Richards knew otherwise. On April 19, 1993, she wrote to State Representative Clyde Alexander (a sponsor of the Compact in the Texas House), indicating that the legislation gave Compact commissioners the authority to "consider contracting for waste shipments on a case by case basis."

Reporters recently heard Governor Bush's Press Secretary Ray Sullivan repeating the same assurances Richards had offered up when she was governor. The beauty of the compact, Sullivan insisted, is that it "gives us [Texas] the ability to control what we're forced to accept from other states." Asked if Governor Bush had actually read the Compact Bill, and if he were aware that it expressly empowers appointed Compact commissioners to accept waste from any other state, Sullivan said, "The Governor is aware of the Compact. He's been fully briefed. I'm not with the Governor twenty-four hours a day."

Walking with Bill Addington along a narrow levee toward the cane-choked riverbank, I understand that for him the Guerra farm is worth the fight-worth his life, if that's what it takes. Bill bends down to the cracked ground to pick up rusted beer cans, brown bottles, bits of blue-green glass. His grandfather, he recalls, who translated his name directly from Arabic to Spanish ("Guerra" means "war"), came to Sierra Blanca from Lebanon, via Mexico. He opened the grocery, bought a farm, and later married a Valentine woman whose brother had ridden with Pancho Villa. "My family's lived in Hudspeth County for three generations," Bill says, pointing out the ancient system of levees and shallow acequias that carry water to old cotton fields. "I'd love to live down here after all this dump business is settled."

On the Maine Coast, tides run huge and cold and clean, and Mainers guard their lucrative fishing industry as jealously as Texans protect their property rights. Along with the summer tourist, the lobster is Maine's most precious resource, and in Maine's pristine environment, nuclear waste seems an obscene violation. For Maine Yankee, storing waste on-site was never a legal option.

So a powerful tide of nuclear utility dollars is now flowing in the direction of Sierra Blanca, a town that might have developed a modest desert tourism industry but never had a chance. Nuclear waste has become a hot current, flooding into the U.S. Congress, and then into Texas. According to one report, compiled by the Austin activist group Feminists for a Compassionate Society, out-of-state utility PACs contributed $688,000 to House sponsors of the Compact bill in 1995 and 1996. Eighty percent of those sponsors are from Texas. Ninety percent of the radioactive curies in the dump will come from the nuclear utilities' waste stream. A number of nuclear plants in the country have either shut down or are due to be decommissioned in the next ten years. Where will their waste go?

Nuclear generators currently send their low-level waste to the two open dumps: Envirocare in Toole County, Utah, and Chem Nuclear in Barnwell, South Carolina. Every low-level dump in the country has leaked dangerous radionuclides into the air, earth or water.

For the public, radionuclides accumulating in the environment represent a very real threat, both a private and a public health problem. For the industry, the problem is purely economic: how to rid itself of the costs of storing material that will remain toxic for hundreds and thousands of years. To achieve that, the industry has forged an odd tactical alliance with doctors who warn that if Sierra Blanca doesn't get the dump, nuclear medicine (e.g., treatments for some of the same cancers caused by exposure to radioactivity) will come to an end. Many of the dump's supporters in Congress make the same argument. "We have to have a reasonable place to put [medical waste]," Congressman Gene Green told the Houston Chronicle. In fact, medical waste will account for less than one percent of the curies in the dump; most will come from sources like the South Texas Nuclear Project, which provides the electricity in Congressman Green's Houston congressional district.

Not surprisingly, this fight boils down to money, hard and soft. In the seventies, the utility companies decided to build nuke plants that were supposed to provide us with cheaper, cleaner power. The nuclear plants turned out to be enormously expensive, and the problem of what to do with the waste was never resolved. The Compact Bill will help the industry solve that problem by requiring the state of Texas to assume liability for the nuclear waste created by profit-making businesses.

The nuclear industry's radioactive waste stream is even flowing through the campaign to deregulate the electric utility industry, which is complicated by the companies' need to be relieved of old nuclear reactors riding heavy on their corporate shoulders. Across the country, electric companies claim they are burdened by "stranded costs" amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. One energy company spokesman estimates that cleanup and waste storage costs make up at least 60 to 80 percent of stranded costs. Companies like HL&P (Houston Industries) and Texas Utilities-which own the only two commercial reactors in the state-are already petitioning the Public Utility Commission to shift that financial burden to taxpayers and ratepayers.

For the past two years, Bill Linnell has patched together work as a substitute teacher and part-time lobsterman, while also putting in long hours with Cheaper Safer Power, a grassroots organization intent on shutting down the Maine Yankee power plant. In the eighties, the group introduced three unsuccessful shut-down referenda, then four months ago tried again with a referendum that would require the plant to close in 2008 when its current license expires. That referendum passed. "I could make a strong argument that this was the final straw that brought them down," Linnell says. "It's too bad every town doesn't have a right to have a referendum."

Two months ago, Linnell said he thought Maine might be trying to slip out of the Compact with Texas and Vermont. After the referendum, Maine Yankee directors decided to shut the plant down in August, and Linnell said that the plan to bury waste in Texas might no longer make financial sense for the utility. His prediction seemed correct in early October, when just prior to House vote on the Compact, Maine Yankee's directors announced that the Compact is no longer economically attractive for Maine ratepayers. It would be quicker and cheaper for Maine, they said, to send the radioactive waste to Barnwell, South Carolina, where a low-level dump is already licensed and operating.

The utility's abrupt announcement threatened to undermine the financial underpinning of the Sierra Blanca facility, to be paid for in part by $25 million each from Maine and Vermont. On September 22, Maine Governor Angus King wrote to Governor Bush, saying that because the Maine plant will start moving irradiated parts and low-level waste from the Wiscasset site as early as 1998, Maine can't support the Compact agreement as presently written. He complained that language in the state law and the Compact "places Maine citizens at risk of not getting the benefit of their bargain with Texas and Vermont, in the absence of any equitable adjustments in Maine's monetary obligations under the Compact." Moreover, Maine Yankee would have to deposit larger wastes than allowed under the terms of the Compact approved by the Texas Legislature and sent to the Congress. Bush replied immediately, signing off on the bottom of King's letter, assuring him that Texas was willing to comply with all of King's requests and rewrite the terms of the Compact in order to keep Maine's waste business.

Four generations of Bill Linnell's family have lived in Maine, and lobstering is an honored profession among them. Twelve years ago, to protect Maine's coastal waters, he joined the fight against the nuclear plant. When Texas picked the Sierra Blanca site, Linnell says the word was out that Texas wanted the dump, that people there wanted it. "I knew that was ridiculous," he says.

Over the years Linnell, like Bill Addington, has had to make sacrifices. He delayed his marriage, ran for city council in Cape Elizabeth, and won. He even wore a suit and tie. "It gave me credibility. They knew I wasn't a guy who just fell off the turnip truck."

Addington hasn't had time to run for office. He's been too busy holding back the flood of events engulfing his tiny town. In the last month he's been to Washington twice and Austin once. Since he began his hunger strike, his voice, though still firm, has grown fainter. He recalled walking around DuPont Circle in Washington, sniffing seductive scents from expensive restaurants. "Did you know you could gain weight just by smelling cooking smells? It's true," he said, excitedly. Then, to defuse concern for his health, he made yet another joke. "I've lost almost twenty pounds," he said. "Who needs Jenny Craig?"

From Maine to Texas, citizens like Linnell and Addington have been asking more pointedly: Who needs the nuclear industry's poisonous offal? When he begins to eat again, the already lanky Bill Addington can regain his strength and vigor. If the nuclear industry's Sierra Blanca dump becomes a reality, Addington's land and home will never recover.

Houston writer Olive Hershey is at work on a second novel, set in far West Texas.