Editorial: Listening to waste worries

Friday, July 2, 1999 | 10 a.m.

Over the years Nevadans have had good reason to be skeptical of the U.S. Department of Energy. Too often in the case of the department's investigation into the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a high-level nuclear waste repository, valid scientific objections to the storage and transportation of nuclear waste have been ignored by the agency.

So on Dec. 15, 1997, when it was revealed that a truck -- carrying low-level nuclear waste from a DOE site in Fernald, Ohio, to the Nevada Test Site -- had fluid leaking from its trailer in Kingman, Ariz., you could almost hear the collective groan from Southern Nevadans: Here we go again. Luckily the waste that escaped from the truck was not radioactive, and in a refreshing move the DOE halted shipments until the shipping program's safety could be investigated further.

The worries about transportation were genuine. There had been 5.3 million cubic feet of low-level nuclear waste delivered to the Test Site from Fernald since 1985, and as the Sun's Mary Manning reported Tuesday, it's been estimated another 110 million cubic feet of this waste still needs to be removed. In addition, the trucks containing the waste had been traveling across Hoover Dam and through heavily populated areas of Southern Nevada on their way to the Nevada Test Site in Mercury.

Along with zeroing in on improving the safety of the canisters and trucks, the DOE also considered what route the trucks carrying the waste should take when transportation started again. Now the shipments, which resumed Monday, will head to the Nevada Test Site along a sparsely populated route through Northern Nevada, completely skipping Southern Nevada's congested roadways. Even the DOE's longtime critics, including the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, Bob Loux, praised the department's decision. The DOE should be commended for listening and acting on local concerns -- now if we can just get the same attention regarding problems with the Yucca Mountain investigation.