Editorial: Talk can be cheap in election

Friday, Oct. 27, 2000 | 10:12 a.m.

In the twilight of a political campaign, candidates will make unexpected promises. These late pledges, more often than not, turn out to be hollow. So Nevadans should view skeptically Republican vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney's vow this week that George W. Bush would be just as strong as Al Gore when it comes to Nevadans' concerns regarding federal attempts to build a nuclear waste repository in this state.

At a Tuesday campaign stop in Reno, Cheney said the Republican ticket wants the Environmental Protection Agency to keep the regulatory authority to set the health and safety standards that must be met before any waste storage facility can be built. This has become an issue because Republican leaders in Congress want to strip this authority from the EPA and transfer it to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which wants to establish much weaker standards. The nuclear power industry itself has argued that tougher guidelines could make it too costly to build a repository.

Previously during the presidential campaign, neither Cheney nor Bush would comment on Congress' legislation to weaken the standards, which President Clinton vetoed in April, a veto that Gore wholeheartedly supported. There have been repeated attempts to get the Bush campaign to speak about this legislation. But the Republican ticket didn't want to say anything specific -- until earlier this week.

So why the change of heart? For starters, Cheney looked terrible when he visited Las Vegas Oct. 10, saying he didn't know if Bush would veto a bill softening the standards. Making matters worse, and giving Nevada Republican politicians and party officials considerable heartburn, were the comments made by former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo. Simpson, a friend of Cheney's who accompanied him on his Las Vegas stop, said the NRC should set the standards for a repository -- a statement that set off alarm bells here. A fire also was lit under Bush when the Gore campaign started running television commercials pointing out the Texas governor's ties to the nuclear power industry and Bush's refusal to take a stand in opposition to the proposed weakening of standards for a repository. The accumulation of these events certainly prompted this latest round of "me-too" polit ics by the Bush campaign.

Nevadans understandably are skittish about what the presidential candidates have to say about nuclear waste storage. After all, the federal government wants to bury 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, which is only 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. And our nervousness isn't alleviated in knowing that the government has failed miserably in the past in disposing of plutonium and other radioactive wastes. For instance, as the New York Times reported last week, the U.S. Department of Energy finally concluded that much of this radioactive garbage, which was released into soil or buried in flimsy containers during the four decades of nuclear weapons production, was 10 times larger than estimated.

This latest news about our nation's inability to properly dispose of radioactive waste hardly constitutes a ringing endorsement for the federal government's promises today that Yucca Mountain will be safe, too. So Nevadans should not only look carefully at what candidates say on the hustings about nuclear waste, they should also note if the candidates are simply playing catch-up. Gore consistently has stood by Nevada's side and opposed Republican congressional leaders when they were hell-bent on placing nuclear waste here. In contrast, it's impossible to imagine George W. Bush standing in the way of GOP congressional leadership, especially since he has ignored the concerns that Nevadans have about nuclear waste storage until the 11th hour of a presidential campaign.