Editorial: Show some sense on nuke waste

Wednesday, May 16, 2001 | 9:02 a.m.

In the past week Vice President Dick Cheney has been making the media rounds, putting his spin on an energy task force's recommendations that will be formally unveiled on Thursday. Cheney, who is in charge of the task force, has said the report will promote more use of nuclear power. In an interview with CNN last week, the vice president spoke with a sense of urgency in building a permanent repository to store the waste generated from nuclear power. That obviously is alarming to Nevadans since our state is the only one under consideration for a nuclear waste dumpsite.

Cheney also added this assessment about nuclear waste storage: "The French do this very successfully and very safely in an environmentally sound, sane manner." Unfortunately for Nevada, the United States is not handling this the way France does -- in fact, it's quite the opposite. As Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., pointed out, a local community in France can veto a move by the national government to select it as a repository site. Here in the United States, a state targeted for a repository can have its disapproval overridden by Congress.

It also should be noted that in France there isn't the same kind of false panic to develop a repository. Berkley mentioned that in France they are willing to take as long as 100 years to find a suitable site -- a site, by the way, that will have stricter safety standards than what is being proposed here. The irony is that if this nation actually employed France's nuclear waste policies, Nevada's Yucca Mountain would no longer be under consideration in light of the overwhelming public opposition and the unsafe conditions for storing waste here.

It's not just France, either, that has a much different view on nuclear waste storage. As the Sun's Mary Manning noted in a story earlier this year, mayors in Sweden's cities also are given the right to veto a repository and, as is the case with France, their nation is taking a more deliberate, thoughtful policy on this matter. Unlike the United States, Sweden actually is asking cities and towns whether they would like to be considered. In our nation, Congress gave no deference to Nevada and decided in 1987 that this state alone would be studied, which was the politically expedient course to take at the time.

Instead of trying to force Nevada to take 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, President Bush instead should try a more collegial approach, one that would actually heed the views of Nevadans. This week the current confrontational approach played itself out again, this time in a federal courthouse in San Francisco. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments involving a dispute between the state of Nevada and the federal government over Nevada's refusal to issue water permits to build and operate a repository proposed for Yucca Mountain.

If there is any optimism that can be gleaned from Cheney's comments -- and in many ways it is like looking for a needle in a haystack -- it is that the Associated Press reported Monday that advisers to the vice president said the task force's report won't commit the administration to a position on the dumpsite. It is hoped that the administration will do more than just keep an open mind, and will actually discard the ludicrous notion that the development of nuclear power must somehow be contingent on settling the repository issue as soon as possible. There is no need to rush this process. After all, the waste has been stored safely at the sites of commercial nuclear reactors for decades now.

On the campaign trail last year Bush had a lot to say about the federal government having too much say in the decisions that affect the lives of Americans. If there ever was an issue that cried out for letting a state have a say in its future, it certainly would be the storage of man's deadliest waste.