Editorial: Full steam ahead for dumpsite?

Thursday, April 12, 2001 | 8:24 a.m.

The Bush administration's position on Yucca Mountain is emerging, and it's disquieting to say the least. While the Department of Energy's budget released this week contained cuts to important programs -- renewable energy research, nuclear weapons site cleanup, etc. -- President Bush is recommending a 14 percent increase in spending on the Yucca Mountain Project.

For that matter, no funds were set aside for research into transmutation, a promising new technology that some scientists believe could make high-level nuclear waste less harmful. If transmutation pans out, the need for a central nuclear waste repository could be made obsolete. Granted, transmutation is still in the experimental stage, but to offer no funding is myopic.

It also was disheartening that the Department of Energy's budget report acknowledged that it was built on the premise that the agency will recommend the construction of a repository at Yucca Mountain. So much for an unbiased, scientific assessment of whether 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste can be buried inside Yucca Mountain, which is just 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the nation's fastest growing metropolitan area.

If the president truly wanted a conservative budget that trimmed government waste, he would stop the folly of spending billions of dollars to build a high-level nuclear waste repository, a structure that cannot plausibly protect the safety of Nevadans. For that matter, there are no guarantees that shipping this waste across the country can be done without endangering the lives of people who live along these routes. A better alternative would have been to step up research into transmutation -- and put Yucca Mountain on hold. But this administration plainly is stuck in the past, showing no imagination in dealing with such a critical issue that can have deadly consequences.