Editorial: Clinton rebukes nuke bill

Wednesday, April 26, 2000 | 9:37 a.m.

President Clinton's veto Tuesday of nuclear waste legislation was an instance of an elected official willing to stand on principle. Clinton recognizes that the legislation, which would send nuclear waste to Nevada by 2007, would set aside a scientific resolution in favor of a political decision. In contrast, a more common thread among politicians has been pandering to the nuclear power industry, which desperately wants to get this waste off its hands. But in its rush to get rid of the accumulation of high-level nuclear waste on site where commercial reactors are located, Congress' proposed solution is worse: burying 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in a single location that is geologically unstable and dangerous.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., whose home state has plenty of nuclear waste, has even resorted to distortion in trying to persuade people that Yucca Mountain is ready to accept nuclear waste. "The Yucca Mountain storage facility has passed and surpassed every safety standard. It should be put to use," Hastert said on April 11. But that statement is false. While a draft environmental impact statement by the Department of Energy didn't include any potential "showstoppers," the fact is that the federal investigation is still under way and no final decision has been made by any government agency yet. Indeed, there is evidence that not only shows the ground is unstable in the Yucca Mountain area, but that also the patterns of water movement would endanger the safe storage of the waste there.

Now the focus turns back to Congress, where it would take a two-thirds vote to override the president's veto. Nevada's congressional delegation was able to get enough votes that would sustain a veto the first time around, but there have been indications that the nuclear power industry and the Republican congressional leadership are working hard to collect enough votes to override the president's veto. For Nevada's sake, and the millions of Americans who live along the routes where this deadly cargo would be transported across the nation to get to Yucca Mountain, Congress should sustain Clinton's veto.