Feds restart ads promoting tours of dump

Benjamin Grove

Thursday, Aug. 29, 2002 | 10:57 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department is again advertising for Yucca Mountain tours, irking Nevada officials.

A one-quarter page advertisement in Wednesday's B section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal invited the public to three free tours of the Yucca site. The department aims to make the desert ridge the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump, a plan Congress approved this year.

The department expects 225 people on each of the tours Sept. 21, Oct. 19 and Nov. 16. A box lunch is included for a $6 fee, the ad says.

"The tour provides you with the opportunity to talk with experts in the fields of geology, engineering, waste management, and environmental science," the ad says.

Nevada officials have long said the tours are a gimmick used to spur public support for the project, and that the taxpayer-paid advertisements are improper.

"If you've ever been on one of these tours you know it's very promotional," said Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, the state's Yucca watchdog. "They're really used as a brain-washing tool."

In 2000, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the tours and advertisements amounted to federal lobbying for a site the Energy Department had not even officially approved.

So Reid used his influence as a member of the Appropriations Committee to stop the ads. He inserted an amendment into a budget bill barring the department from using money that year to advertise Yucca tours.

But Reid's ad ban only applied to that year, Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson said. Now that Congress has approved the site, the department decided to run it again, Benson said, despite Reid's objection.

"There are a lot of people who are interested in finding out what is going on out there," Benson said. "It never was promotional, and it is not (now). Any tour we give lets people see what is going on out there, lets them question the experts and we let them make up their own minds."

Wednesday marked the first time the Energy Department had run the tour advertisement since Reid's ad ban amendment in 2000.

Reid is traveling in Africa. But his aides said Reid clearly still objects in principle to the tour advertisements.

"Sen. Reid feels that the Department of Energy should be spending their money on the 300-plus unanswered scientific questions at Yucca Mountain rather than spending the money on advertisements to get people to tour the site," Reid spokeswoman Shannon Eagan said.

The Energy Department will run the advertisement again early next year to promote three spring tours, Benson said. The cost of the two newspaper advertisements was about $2,800, a tiny fraction of the Energy Department's $375 million Yucca budget this year.

The Yucca site is about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Energy Department scientists and contractors have been studying the mountain for 20 years to determine if it would be a safe site to store 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and U.S. defense sites.

The tunnels that would be used to store the waste 1,000 feet below the surface have not been excavated. But the Energy Department bored a five-mile, exploratory tunnel into the mountain for research, which is part of the tour.

The Energy Department, President Bush and Congress all approved the Yucca site earlier this year. Waste could be shipped there as early as 2010, pending a complex approval process by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.