Editorial: Battle against dump wages on

Tuesday, Feb. 3, 1998 | 10:42 a.m.

A symbolic milestone was passed over the weekend when the Department of Energy defaulted on its congressionally mandated obligation to move high-level nuclear waste to a permanent dump.

Nuclear industry advocates lamented the Department of Energy's failure to complete its task by Feb. 1, but they'll have to forgive Nevadans for not shedding any tears. From the beginning, the process has been flawed because it has been heavily politicized. Originally, a number of sites throughout the nation were to be considered for a permanent dump. But in 1987 Congress passed legislation reducing the number to be studied from three to just a single site, located at Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It shouldn't be too surprising that states with enormous political clout in our nation's capital, such as Texas and Washington state, suddenly disappeared from the initial list of consideration.

The nuclear power industry tried every weapon in its arsenal to make Nevadans think the dump was inevitable. It even hired some prominent Las Vegas political consultants and television journalists to create a media campaign to try to soften Nevada's opposition to the dump. These spin doctors even used the theory of inevitability in their attempt to persuade Nevada to accept financial benefits in return for giving up its opposition to the dump. To their credit, though, Nevadans have refused to buy into the Faustian bargain.

Eventually, people elsewhere will start to oppose a single dump. After all, 90 percent of the nation's high-level commercial nuclear waste is located east of the Mississippi River; simple arithmetic tells us many Americans will be in harm's way if the waste has to travel clear across the country to a dump in Nevada. Accidents involving transportation should be a concern, as should terrorism along the route. The best option, which the nuclear industry and its friends in Washington's power corridor don't want to acknowledge, also happens to be the simplest: Store the nuclear waste at each nuclear power plant until a genuine, scientific examination is conducted on several sites around the nation.