Letter: State risks getting dump, no benefits

Sunday, Jan. 10, 1999 | 10:19 a.m.

Richardson may have made the right move politically to release the viability assessment to the state before anyone else, but now we are faced with the anti-nuclear spin before other stakeholders get to see the report. The viability assessment is not a suitability report or a site recommendation to the president.

The viability assessment gives Congress an idea of what the repository design will resemble and some idea how much it will cost to finish the site characterization of Yucca Mountain. There is a lot of science that still needs to be done and each step along the way the project is being overseen by the presidentially-appointed and nationally respected scientists on the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Nye County has its own independent drilling program still going and may be expanding in the near future.

A repository at Yucca Mountain is not a done deal, far from it. What may be a done deal is that the window is closing on the state's opportunity to sit down with the federal government and private industry and negotiate some form of benefits package since we are the only site being studied to help the nation solve this national environmental challenge.

Recent press coverage details some of the problems with the state's oversight of Yucca Mountain. The state is adamant in its opposition to Yucca Mountain, but where has that opposition left us? The study goes forward and we don't get a thing. I used to work at the Test Site and my brothers and sisters have safely managed nuclear projects out there since the early 1950s.

The way I see it, the federal government is expected to give a site recommendation either thumbs up or thumbs down in 2001 -- we could realistically get the repository and get nothing in return. Who wins then?

Bill Vasconi