Editorial: Rule changes keep our heads spinning

Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2002 | 8:55 a.m.

The federal government will do anything -- including changing the rules of the game -- to bury nuclear waste in Nevada. For example, the Energy Department altered the rules on Yucca Mountain so that they rely heavily on metal containers isolating the nuclear waste from the outside world instead of relying primarily on the mountain's rock as was originally planned. That dramatic departure led to a state of Nevada lawsuit last year that is trying to block the change.

Meanwhile, the ink had barely dried from President Bush's signature of legislation giving the green light to the Yucca Mountain project when two key senators hinted that another rule may change as well. Two weeks ago The Washington Post printed a letter from Sens. Frank Murkowski of Alaska and Larry Craig of Idaho in which the Republican duo suggested that Congress could amend existing law so that Yucca Mountain could hold 130,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, not the 77,000 tons allowed under current law.

Nearly doubling the dump's capacity -- and the amount that would need to be shipped cross-country to Nevada -- would be a sweeping change and something that supporters of Yucca Mountain obviously didn't want to play up during the Senate's debate over the legislation. Acknowledging that specter could have created more defections to Nevada's camp by senators who already were worried about the transportation dangers posed by thousands of shipments from 77,000 tons alone.

The unrelenting attempts by Congress and the Energy Department to make a square peg fit into a round hole, no matter how dangerous it is, show that they have no shame in making Nevada the nation's nuclear waste dumping ground.