Editorial: Legislators must unite over Yucca

Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2002 | 8:52 a.m.

For 15 years Nevada fought hard against Yucca Mountain in the political arena but lost the final battle in Congress this past July. Its battle is now in the courts and so far state officials have reason for optimism. For example, the state asked that its three lawsuits against federal agencies be heard successively by the same three-judge panel. Last week the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed and the arguments are scheduled for next September.

Law firms hired by the state will argue in separate cases that the Department of Energy, without proper notification to Nevada or Congress, changed the rules regarding how a site would be determined suitable for storing high-level nuclear waste; that the Environmental Protection Agency set 100,000 years as the regulatory time frame for protecting against radiation, when the National Academy of Sciences recommended 1 million years, and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission deviated from the Nuclear Waste Policy Act when it ruled that the site's geology does not have to be the main barrier against deadly radiation.

Nevada asked for all three cases to be heard by the same judges so that they would understand fully how the federal government orchestrated its campaign for Yucca Mountain, how it arbitrarily changed the rules and ignored inconvenient facts in fulfilling its preordained policy. Because the reach of politics is supposed to end at the courtroom door, with decisions based solely on facts, the state should have a better chance to stop what surely is a threat not only to Nevada but also to the nation. The job now is for the 2003 Legislature to regard this legal fight as nonpartisan. As the need for funding the fight arises, we're looking for legislators to vote not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Nevadans.