Editorial: Just what’s the rush, anyway?

Thursday, Aug. 1, 2002 | 8:43 a.m.

A National Academy of Sciences panel recently heard an update from the Energy Department on the future work at the Yucca Mountain project, and what that scientific panel was told Tuesday was anything but reassuring. The Yucca Mountain project's top administrator, Margaret Chu, outlined an ambitious goal to meet the nuclear waste dump's planned 2010 opening. No one seriously believes the department can meet that deadline, which means that Chu's plan to do so almost certainly will require dangerous shortcuts.

The Energy Department wants to use what it calls a "modular" approach to building the dump. Chu envisions that nuclear waste will be shipped to Yucca Mountain, and stored on the site's surface, before construction of the nuclear waste dump is complete. "Instead of building a whole house at one time, we build part of the house in order to begin receiving waste," Chu said. Rather than dubbing it a "modular" approach, we'd say that it was a "half-baked" idea that resembles the rest of the project's failures to date.

It would appear to us that Chu's incentive to meet the 2010 goal has more to do with a political deal that the Bush administration struck with Utah's U.S. senators, Republicans Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, to get their votes last month to send nuclear waste to Nevada. The senators received a pledge from the administration that it would work to block storing nuclear waste at a temporary site proposed in Utah, a dump that may be more likely to open if Yucca Mountain gets delayed past 2010. Of course, those assurances from the White House may not mean much. The utilities that want to store the waste in Utah are willing to do so with their own money, not the federal government's, and a federal judge on Wednesday ruled that a Utah law banning nuclear waste from the state was unconstitutional. Welcome to the club, Utah, whose members include small Western states that are treated like the nation's dumping ground.

It also is troubling that Chu is contemplating not using titanium "drip shields," which are supposed to prevent water from corroding metal waste containers inside Yucca Mountain. While we believe that the "drip shields" won't offer the needed protection their supporters claim they would, and their consideration at all signals why the project is so dangerous that it shouldn't get a license to open, it's amazing that what nominal protection has been considered may now be discarded. Chu's comments this week demonstrate just how little the Bush administration cares about the safety of Nevadans in its rush to bury nuclear waste in our state.