Where I Stand — Guest columnist Ken Cook: Lifting Yucca awareness

Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2002 | 8:27 a.m.

Editor's note: In August the Where I Stand column is written by guest writers. Today's columnist is Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit, Washington-based organization. The Environmental Working Group uses computer-assisted research to turn data into usable information to improve public health and protect the environment.

"I THINK they're full of crap," spat the Energy Department's exasperated chief spokesman, Joe Davis, in reference to my organization, "and you can print that in your newspaper."

Happily, The Herald of Ogden, Utah, did just that on July 2, boosting the spirits of everyone here at the Environmental Working Group as we hunkered down for the final days of the Senate fight against the DOE's Yucca Mountain nuclear dump boondoggle. I think it's fair to say that Joe veered just a bit outside Bush administration guidance on how to "change the tone" in Washington. But we had seen it coming. He seemed on the verge of losing it a few days before, when he sputtered to a Scripps-Howard reporter in alimentary contradiction that EWG was "full of prunes" for digging up an embarrassing document that his boss, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, had signed in 1998 when he was a U.S. senator.

No, I am not referring to the legislation Abraham had once introduced to abolish the Department of Energy, the agency George Bush ironically tossed him as a consolation prize after Michigan voters booted Abraham out of office in 2000. I'm referring to the letter then-Sen. Abraham sent to Bill Clinton's DOE head, Bill Richardson, expressing indignation that Michigan officials had not been adequately informed -- nor sumptuously funded -- in connection with a shipment of nuclear material the feds planned to truck through the state and over a bridge that Abraham understood to be awfully busy. "The ramifications of an accident," wrote the senator, with a principled shiver, "are too serious to consider anything less than the very best emergency response preparedness."

Some of you are noting, correctly, that there should be two $$'s in the official government spelling of "preparedness." But the bigger problem with Abraham's letter was the awkward timing of its re-emergence.

Cloaked in the full authority of the bureaucracy he had wanted to legislate out of existence, Abraham was in the midst of barnstorming the nation to promote the Yucca Mountain dump. He assured all who would listen that there was absolutely no risk whatsoever in sending 77,000 tons of lethal radioactive waste cross country, through thousands of cities and towns, via thousands of train and truck shipments over 30 years or more, all of it heading for Vegas.

Indeed, the official line from the Bush administration was that even the slightest concern about wrecks or terrorist attacks was the work of anti-nuke nuts, environmental panty-waists, Saddam lovers, or one of those scaremongering, sore losers from Nevada, led by the likes of Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Kenny Guinn.

As a candidate, Bush famously and earnestly lied to Nevadans. He told them that Yucca would go nowhere without his full and presidential review, which in the event took less of his time and sweat than one of those jogs he says helps to clear his head, and we've never had a president with a clearer head. Not that the heat of the Yucca debate caused the Bush administration to forget the state that tipped the election his way. His appointees always remembered to question the integrity of a Yucca skeptic like Jim Hall, the respected former head of the National Transportation Safety Board, on grounds that they had stooped to accept payment for their service from the biased, defensive citizens of Nevada.

No wonder the DOE press shop went nuclear when reporters asked about Abraham's own fraidy-cat phase, in which he officially fretted over a one-time shipment of radioactive material weighing just 11 pounds. It could have fit in his lunch box.

To be fair, Spencer Abraham hardly had the franchise on hypocrisy, flip-flops or falsehoods when it came to Yucca Mountain. By the time we got in the fight, latecomers arriving June 11, only a month before the Senate vote, the nuclear industry had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades on lobbying, political donations and public relations. Important truths about the Yucca dump were buried in a mountain of disinformation.

We entered the fray with a website designed to excavate one of those truths: Transportation would put nuclear waste in the middle of America's biggest cities long before it ended up in the "middle of nowhere" in Nevada.

Made possible by support from Brian Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun, www.mapscience.org enabled Internet users to type in an address and instantly see on a detailed map how close they were to one of DOE's proposed rail or highway routes for Yucca-bound nuclear waste.

Davis and his chorus in the nuclear industry wearily informed reporters that our Web maps were a yawn, since everyone already knows how close they live to interstates and rail lines.

I have to hand it to them, their spin made its way into hundreds and hundreds of stories about our site.

The Internet has an almost magical power to transport users to an infinity of topics across time and space, so of course most of us mainly use it to find new ways home. More than 250,000 people have retrieved nuclear waste route maps from our site thus far, and even today, long after the Senate vote, as many as 500 people a day log on.

We're betting visitation will reach into the millions by the time DOE selects its final routes to Yucca Mountain. We expect the broader awareness of Yucca's relevance outside Nevada will translate into an even more spirited debate over the wisdom of pursuing the dump, and of perpetuating a power source whose fuel we utilize for a few years, and are then bound to guard for 10,000.

It's hard to see how even the estimable Harry Reid could have done much more to stop Yucca Mountain. Utterly unpersuaded by their colleague John Ensign, all but two other Senate Republicans lockstepped behind their president in favor of the dump.

As for the Democrats, too many betrayed both Reid and their principles, and in doing so breathed undeserved new life into the nuclear power industry.