Editorial: Report by DOE isn’t promising

Tuesday, Aug. 10, 1999 | 9:13 a.m.

What is remarkable -- and unnerving -- about the U.S. Department of Energy's environmental assessment of a plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is not what is in the report, but what is left out. In fact, the report doesn't even address basic requirements typically found in environmental impact statements. As the Sun's Mary Manning noted in her story Friday about the DOE's 1,400-page environmental impact statement, the study doesn't discuss the need for a repository, alternative sites to Yucca Mountain or other methods to manage 70,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste across the nation, almost all of it located east of the Mississippi River.

Along with a failure to deal with such basic issues, the DOE also neglected to address transportation in any serious manner. The DOE did not identify any specific road or rail routes that the nuclear waste might take to get here. One reason for this would seem to be that identifying actual routes the waste might travel could end up being the Achilles' heel for the plan. After all, if residents who lived along these routes knew that man's deadliest waste would be rolling by their houses, they justifiably would be concerned about being jeopardized if an accident occurred. If these residents were to know this information now -- before the review of Yucca Mountain is completed -- that might make them put pressure on their representatives in Washington to rethink their decision to study just one site so far away from where all the waste is being generated.

The DOE scientists working on the Yucca Mountain Project have long objected to characterizations that their work is simply doing the bidding of the nuclear power industry. Yet this environmental impact statement reads as if it had been written by nuclear power lobbyists, not scientists trained to use rigorous analysis to solve difficult problems. An example showing that these scientists won't issue a view contrary to either the nuclear power industry or Congress, which funds the agency's budget, is the failure of the environmental assessment to acknowledge that Congress' decision in 1987 to reduce the number of sites being studied -- from three to just one -- created a situation making it impossible to determine whether there were other places in the nation that are safer and better suited for this task.

The process to determine whether Yucca Mountain is suitable to store high-level nuclear waste has been a joke: Politics, from the very beginning, has trumped science. This environmental impact report will not do anything to lessen the concerns Nevadans have about the DOE's lack of scientific objectivity regarding the many scientific pitfalls of Yucca Mountain.