Editorial: Who are you going to believe?

Friday, May 24, 2002 | 4 a.m.

Joe Davis, the Energy Department's spokesman, showed the agency's contemptuous side last week -- a side we've seen too often before. Davis was dismissive of a panel of transportation experts that, in its testimony before a Senate committee on Wednesday, pointed out the dangers of shipping nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. "This panel is bought and paid for by the state of Nevada," Davis sniffed. He was referring to the fact that Nevada's experts, including an ex-chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, were compensated by state government. Imagine that. Paying someone, who agrees with your views, to share their expertise with others.

If Davis wants to talk about the influence of money in the Yucca Mountain project -- and who really has been bought and paid for -- that is a debate we'd love to have. The reality is that the nuclear power industry's influence, including that over the Energy Department, is what has tainted and marred the scientific investigation of Yucca Mountain's suitability to store 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste.

The multibillion-dollar Yucca Mountain project has been funded principally by the nuclear power industry, with fees being assessed to ratepayers whose electricity comes from nuclear reactors. Nuclear power operators have been urging the government to take the nuclear waste off their hands and bury it somewhere else. In turn, scientists and researchers on the Yucca Mountain project feel a need to please those who are paying their salaries, those who create the nuclear waste, by giving their blessing to a nuclear waste dump -- and ignoring the serious geologic flaws with Yucca Mountain.

Congress, whose members in the last 10 years received $28.6 million in campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry, has hardly been the paragon of impartiality, either. The Energy Department was supposed to look at three sites and pick the best, but Congress, bowing to political pressures and wanting to place the project on a fast track, in 1987 reduced the number to just one: Nevada.

There have been independent federal studies, such as those by the General Accounting Office and the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, that have raised serious doubts about the Yucca Mountain investigation. But those are concerns that, unfortunately, the nuclear power industry has been able to suppress with its control over the Energy Department and Congress. Maybe Davis could remind us again just who is supposed to have been bought and paid for?