Competing Yucca Mountain ads to air in Utah

Benjamin Grove

Monday, May 6, 2002 | 11:09 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- As the House of Representatives prepares to vote on Yucca Mountain Wednesday, a second battle on the airwaves is set to erupt -- this time in Utah -- over the controversial nuclear waste project.

Nevada officials are planning to run a 30-second television commercial in Utah as early as this week that stresses the dangers of shipping nuclear waste, sources said. The advertisement is designed to urge Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett, both Republicans, to oppose the Yucca project, although the two are expected to support the project.

In response to the Nevada commercial, the Alliance for Sound Nuclear Policy, a coalition of nuclear industry and pro-Yucca groups that include the Nuclear Energy Institute, is preparing to run a 30-second spot of its own by the end of the week in Salt Lake City. The commercial touts the safety of nuclear waste shipping.

"We want to make sure the facts are presented to answer the misinformation" in the Nevada ad, said Sherry Reilly, director of the alliance. "We believe the Nevada ad is unnecessarily alarmist and distorts the unblemished safe transportation record of used nuclear fuel."

A media source tipped off the alliance that Nevada officials planned a Utah ad buy, Reilly said, so the alliance quickly prepared a spot of its own.

The Utah commercial would be the second one paid for by Nevada officials and environmental groups. The first, run on two network affiliates in Burlington, Vt., was targeted at Sens. James Jeffords, an Independent, and Democrat Patrick Leahy, both of whom are still expected to vote for the Yucca project.

At issue is the federal plan to construct the world's first permanent high-level nuclear waste dump in underground tunnels at Yucca Mountain. Nevada's four-member delegation in Congress has been working to derail the project in Congress. It is a longshot effort at best; the House is expected to overwhelmingly approve the project this week. A Senate vote is expected by the end of July.

The issue of shipping waste in America has become a blistering point of contention between pro- and anti-Yucca forces.

Nevada officials say the "transportation issue" is one of their best arguments against the dump. They argue that a massive, unprecedented -- and dangerous -- transportation campaign would be needed to haul 77,000 tons of waste to Nevada from 131 temporary storage sites nationwide, mostly nuclear power plants and U.S. defense sites.

"People make mistakes; accidents happen," Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said in a national radio address Saturday. "But an accident involving nuclear waste could be catastrophic, exposing whole communities to radiation and utterly destroying the environment for nearly a quarter of a million years. The cost of evacuation and remediation would be astronomic, not to mention the unspeakable costs of human suffering."

But industry officials point to their history of shipping nuclear waste in America. They say they have made roughly 3,000 shipments over 1.6 million miles since the 1960s, with only a few accidents and no releases of radiation.

Among the industry officials who have joined the fray are two executives from companies that manufacture nuclear waste transportation containers. Their companies stand to win lucrative waste-shipping contracts if Yucca is approved.

Nevada officials and anti-nuclear activist groups have orchestrated a "disinformation" campaign about the Yucca Mountain project that is doomed to fail, Jack Edlow, president of Edlow International Co., and David Blee, a representative of NAC International, said today at a press conference in Washington.

"It will not work," Edlow said "Congress will not be bamboozled by these people into stopping Yucca Mountain."

Nevada's two House members, Berkley and Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., are still scrambling to line up a few last-minute votes against the Yucca project.

Gibbons said today he will probably be able to muster only 20 fellow Republicans to vote against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste legislation in the House.

Gibbons said he had "no illusion for the chances of success" in the House but he was optimistic that the bill could be stopped in the Senate.

He estimated there will be between 100 and 140 votes against Yucca Mountain in the House.

The House vote likely will be Wednesday afternoon after two hours of debate.

The Nevada lawmakers may try to use a parliamentary tactic to derail the vote by arguing that the Yucca Mountain project would be an unfunded mandate for states.

Like the Nevadans, nuclear industry officials continue their behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts this week. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's leading lobby group, was scheduled to host 22 House staffers Sunday and today in Las Vegas.