Bush gets new heat on Yucca

Tuesday, May 16, 2000 | 11:35 a.m.

Sierra Club of Nevada leaders said today that they were disappointed by a one-paragraph statement by Republican presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush and feared he would allow a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.

Bush issued the statement last week, echoing Democrats who have opposed 77,000 tons of nuclear waste arriving in Nevada before Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has passed scientific muster.

"The Sierra Club of Nevada is disappointed, but not surprised, by George W. Bush's alarming statement," said Jane Feldman of the Sierra Club in Las Vegas.

"It worries us to hear that kind of thing said because that's not what we've been hearing from the Clinton administration for the last eight years," Feldman said.

Five times in the past eight years President Clinton has vetoed GOP-backed efforts to move highly radioactive wastes from 73 nuclear reactors nationwide to Yucca, even though the site has not been proved scientifically safe and Congress and the president have not approved a permanent repository there.

Clinton also opposed allowing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must license any repository, to set health and safety standards for Yucca, instead of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan in Austin, Texas, said that Bush would have nothing further to say on the nuclear repository.

"I think he has made his position clear," he said. "He will not support any legislation unless it is scientifically safe."

Feldman noted that selecting Yucca as the only repository site to study was a political decision, not a scientific one.

"If we are basing this on science, that is a threat to the people of Nevada," Feldman said. "Science is not going to save us here in Nevada."