Local officials clash with Sununu on Yucca

Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2002 | 9:48 a.m.

Top local officials and a leading nuclear industry lobbyist are clashing over the effect of Yucca Mountain on national security.

Both sides have accused the other of putting up a smokescreen to cloud the hotly debated issue of sending high-level nuclear waste to Nevada.

In a letter Monday to President George W. Bush, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and Clark County Chairman Dario Herrera said shipping the waste to the state ignores the risks of terrorism along the transportation routes.

But John Sununu, the industry's Yucca Mountain point man, accused Goodman and Herrera of trying to steer the president off course in their bid to stop the multibillion-dollar Yucca Mountain project's approval process.

"I think what you are hearing from the mayor and the commissioner is just a smokescreen," Sununu said. "Nevadans can't have it both ways. They can't say transporting it is a problem and leaving it at the facilities is not. What you're hearing is a disingenuous argument from the opponents of Yucca Mountain.

Herrera and Goodman, however, lashed back.

"Mr. Sununu is paid a lot of money to muddy up this issue," Herrera said. "The fact of the matter is Yucca Mountain does nothing to promote the national security issue, and he's using it as a smokescreen to show Nevadans that we should accept this dump in our backyard."

Goodman this morning called Sununu a "prostitute" and a"hired gun" for the nuclear industry.

"Why should anybody want to listen to him?" Goodman asked. "If he was a true public servant talking about the good for the country, it would be one thing. But he's on the industry's payroll."

In recent days Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and chief of staff to former President George Bush, has suggested Nevadans have a patriotic duty to accept the repository. His remarks have enraged local leaders.

In their letter to the current president, both Goodman and Herrera urged Bush not to follow Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham's recommendation finding Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, suitable to store the deadly nuclear waste.

Abraham last week informed Gov. Kenny Guinn that he will ask the president to designate Yucca Mountain as the nation's sole repository for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste now being stored at reactors in 39 states.

He said shipping spent nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain was important to national security.

"We should consolidate the nuclear wastes to enhance protection against terrorist attacks by moving them to one underground location that is far from population centers," Abraham wrote Guinn.

But in their letter, Goodman and Herrera tried to turn the tables on Abraham.

They insisted the risks of terrorism are much less if the radioactive materials remain at the reactor sites, which can be heavily guarded.

Abraham, the two officials said, failed to consider in his recommendation that the government would be creating new potential terrorist targets by shipping the waste to Nevada.

"Unless you plan on shutting down the nuclear reactors those will still remain viable threats," Herrera said in an interview. "Then you'll have truckloads full of waste, and those will be new moving targets for potential terrorist attack. And then you'll have another central threat, Yucca Mountain, which happens to be 90 miles away from Las Vegas."

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Office, the state's Yucca Mountain watchdog, estimated that the nuclear industry will have to make 100,000 waste shipments to Yucca Mountain over a 38-year period beginning as early as 2015. That averages out to between 3,000 and 4,000 shipments a year, he said.

"I guess they just assume they're going to beam it over here like they do in Star Trek," Loux said.

But Sununu and Mitch Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's chief Washington lobbyist, said the transportation of nuclear waste has proven to be safe in the past.

"We're confident of the procedures set in place and the ability to ship it safely," Singer said.