Editorial: Don’t trust this ship of fools

Sunday, Aug. 13, 2000 | 9:15 a.m.

Since the dawn of the Atomic Age the federal government has chosen to ignore -- and then lie about -- the dangers of nuclear power and the poisonous waste it generates. The ignorance-is-bliss policy extends today to the federal government and its scientists who close their eyes when discussing worst-case scenarios for the creation of a central repository to store spent nuclear fuel. Not only has the federal government tried to cover up the public safety dangers associated with storing waste at a proposed repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but the government also has elected to sidestep the vexing safety issues involved with shipping 77,000 tons of man's deadliest waste to Nevada from across the nation.

The state of Nevada, though, recently commissioned a study to examine the dangers involved in trucking nuclear waste through the valley on its way to Yucca Mountain. As the Sun's Mary Manning reported last week, state scientists found that, in a worst-case scenario, a traffic wreck on Las Vegas' congested highways involving a truck carrying high-level nuclear waste could result in the eventual deaths of 199 residents from radiation exposure. The state computer simulation also showed that after such a tragedy it could cost as much as $20 billion to clean up the contaminated area.

Using the same worst-case scenario in its computer study, however, the Department of Energy came to a radically different conclusion. The DOE study said that five people ultimately would die from radiation exposure in such an accident and that the cleanup costs would total about $1 billion. But instead of using current population figures, the DOE used information from 1990 -- thus failing to account for the hundreds of thousands of residents who have moved to Las Vegas since then, many thousands of them now living along major transportation routes. The federal agency also didn't acknowledge the fierce winds that can whip through the valley, something state researchers took into account. But if the DOE considered such pesky details they might actually intrude on Congress' intent, which is that Yucca Mountain should be selected as a repository -- facts be da mned.

History has a nasty habit of repeating itself, so it would make sense for the government to try to avoid making the same mistakes. For example, during the Cold War, Americans were assured that the assembly and testing of atomic weapons was safe. It was only decades later that Americans found out that many became ill or died because of exposure to radiation from nuclear weapons.

Indeed, a study published last week by the National Academy of Sciences found that 109 nuclear weapons facilities, including the Nevada Test Site, never would be safe again for public access. There was an acknowledgment by the panel that long-term isolation of these contaminated sites will encounter problems because the probability of the containment "measures failing ... is relatively high." There also was this warning: "At many sites future risk from residual wastes cannot be predicted with any confidence because numerous underlying factors that influence the character, extent and severity of long-term risks are not well understood." If only the DOE would listen to such logic and caution when assessing the dangers of nuclear waste storage.

For that matter, the complacency that occurs even among the best and brightest scientific minds usually results in an unforetold disaster. If Congress doesn't abandon this madness of building a nuclear waste repository in Nevada when common sense dictates that it's unsafe to do so, then Yucca Mountain certainly will enter the nuclear disaster lexicon as have Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

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