Editorial: Whole U.S. served by state’s suit

Thursday, Dec. 5, 2002 | 9:27 a.m.

In a sane world, the selection of Southern Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the "safe" place to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste for the next 10,000 years would be laughed out of court. Certainly there is no one alive who can say with certainty what will happen over the course of 100 centuries. For example, imagine the life in Southern Nevada 10,000 years ago -- Cro-Magnon man living in caves and etching his exploits, which included hunting woolly mammoths with deadly throwing sticks called atlatls. Could Cro-Magnon have imagined McCarran International Airport, the Strip, and Wheel of Fortune slot machines?

Unfortunately, however, the federal government is being taken seriously as it proposes to turn a volcanic formation 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas into an underground vault for the world's deadliest material. The rest of the country has expressed little alarm as Congress and the nuclear power industry have steamrolled toward the Yucca "solution" to radioactive waste management. So it's left to Nevada to shoulder the responsibility and expense of pointing up the potentially catastrophic flaws.

On Monday, Nevada took its case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, filing the first of several briefs in a legal challenge against the federal government's plans. The lawsuit will point out the unpredictability of the waste's storage casks, and the scientific evidence showing that within only 50 years of any failure, ground water 1,300 feet below the mountain could become contaminated -- as well as all the areas where the ground water would flow. The dangers of transporting the waste to Yucca Mountain will be included among the suit's other major points.

With its Yucca plan, the federal government is contending that it can predict the future. Nevada, by opposing the plan, is hoping that it can affect the future -- by stopping something fraught with mortal danger for the generations to come.