Editorial: DOE doesn’t take terrorism seriously

Friday, Nov. 16, 2001 | 5:05 a.m.

Since Sept. 11 the federal government has beefed up the security at nuclear power plants to protect them from possible terrorist attacks. Even the airspace around the nation's nuclear power plants was severely restricted for a week earlier this month because of fears over a terrorist strike.

If such extraordinary precautions are being taken to safeguard nuclear power plants, then that must mean the U.S. Department of Energy is doing likewise in its final assessment to determine whether Nevada's Yucca Mountain should be the dump for the nation's 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. For that matter, the department surely would be checking out terrorism's potential impact on transporting nuclear waste to Nevada, because the trains and trucks hauling the waste would give terrorists hundreds of targets in dozens of cities across the nation.

Yeah, right.

The DOE's final report on Yucca Mountain won't contain an analysis of terrorist threats to the possible repository, Yucca Mountain Project chief Lake Barrett said last week. "It's pretty well done," Barrett said about the report. It is amazing that after the deadliest terrorist attack in our nation's history, the DOE refuses to account for this threat, but then again the DOE doesn't want to upset its patrons in the nuclear power industry and its friends in Congress who are hell-bent on building the repository.

Barrett says the DOE eventually will get around to terrorism when the final design standards are issued for Yucca Mountain -- in a few years. But now is the time to deal with terrorism, not later. A lackadaisical attitude about the dangers posed by storing and transporting nuclear waste has been ingrained in the Yucca Mountain Project. What's dumbfounding is that even the events of Sept. 11 haven't shaken that mindset.