that is safe, especially since the Delta breezes can carry clouds further inland. Also almost any freeway/highway/railroad tracks needed to transport materials is likely to pass through high density populations.
It looks like they may have dropped UC Davis from their list of potential sites after much public outcry.
here's a story from 2003 about the escaping monkey that helped put a stop to a lab at UC DAVIS
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid%3A15384The selling of the biolab
Somewhere between Osama and Saddam, there was that monkey. A slippery simian’s unsolved escape from an ostensibly secure University of California, Davis, research facility remains a major embarrassment for an institution that’s attempting to sell its campus as the site for a level-4 national biocontainment laboratory. The monkey--dubbed Drano by the local paper because of its conjectured escape into the campus sewer system--was one of the first cracks in the university’s campaign to win a $200 million contract from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to build a facility that could handle the highest-level contagions, such as Ebola and anthrax.
“We couldn’t have wished for more than that monkey getting out,” said Stop UCD BioLab Now’s Samantha McCarthy of the monkey, whose escape was leaked to the press on Valentine’s Day. After all, if a monkey could escape a UC Davis lab, why couldn’t a deadly microbe? The ill-timed revelation (the university filed its application with the NIH only days earlier) made national headlines and was seen by many as a harbinger of greater risks ahead. In short order, Davis Mayor Susie Boyd reversed her public stance and issued a proclamation that the city would not support the project. A subsequent series of security breaches at the UC-operated Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories further called into question the safety of locating such a lab on a campus with nearly 50,000 students and faculty.
But unlike the Gray Davis recall campaign--which has had a dedicated crew of conservative politicians and journalists to keep it alive in the daily press--the UC Davis biolab story largely fell out of the headlines as it began to appear that the lab itself would go down the drain. Opponents of the lab now charge that this was a deliberate maneuver on the university’s part to create a diversionary “smokescreen” consisting of questionable relocation plans and an elaborate campaign to spin the perception of the lab from “biodefense” to “biosafety.”
here's a link to a journal on the issue
http://www.badlandsjournal.com/?p=131By contrast, researchers at the second (Tracy) lab would concentrate to a greater degree on natural- or terrorist-caused agricultural diseases, but might also have the authority to work on extremely virulent human diseases such as Ebola, research on which is not permitted in the lower-ranked lab.
UC mentions hoof-and-mouth disease, for example, keeping the door open for anthrax, Ebola, etc, of course.
The situation seems to be that if UC/Lawrence Livermore wins its appeals court case, the deadliest human diseases will be stored and studied in the Bay Area, the most densely (human) populated area in northern California, while hoof-and-mouth disease, for example, will be studied in the San Joaquin Valley, which contains the densest population of cows in the nation.
This is undoubtedly why our wise leaders invited UC to establish a campus in Merced. This is the kind of enlightened, scientific guidance we dumb farmers need down here in the Valley.
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