Letter: Senate should reject Yucca

Tuesday, July 9, 2002 | 8:56 a.m.

The nuclear power industry claims, in its push to open the flawed, geologically unstable, earthquake prone, volcanically active Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, that it is better to consolidate the nation's waste at one site, rather than leave it at nuclear reactors across the country.

But this dangerous plan will only encourage the industry to produce more high-level nuclear waste, (already Yucca Mountain alone will not contain all of the 109,000 metric tons of waste, so another foul plan to store 40,000 metric tons has been hatched to ship waste to yet another Native American reservation in Utah), plus this toxic material will still remain at every operating reactor site and cost American taxpayers $58 billion and counting (more than the combined expenses of the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam and the World Trade Center).

Opening a dump at Yucca Mountain will not solve the nation's radioactive waste problem, it would just introduce potential moving targets for terrorists as it spreads high level waste across our highways and railways.

The Senate should reject the earthquake-prone Yucca project and begin work on a real solution to nuclear waste.

CELIA SUE HECHT