Letter: Not on fast track, Yucca is long overdue

Thursday, Aug. 14, 2003 | 8:44 a.m.

This is in reference to your Aug. 11 editorial on nuclear waste and Rep. Shelley Berkley's proposed legislation requiring a terrorism threat analysis before nuclear waste could be transported to Yucca Mountain for disposal. Berkley wants the analysis to be completed before the Energy Department submits a license application for the disposal repository.

You dismiss the observation by the Nuclear Energy Institute that the potential repository is located on federal property with existing security measures in place and that it adjoins the presumably secure airspace of the Nellis range. Since the facility won't be built for a few years and transportation won't begin for seven or more years, such analyses could be conducted if it hasn't already been conducted.

The editorial said Congress and the White House have "irresponsibly put the Yucca Mountain project on a fast track." The Nuclear Waste Policy Act passed in 1982 called for nuclear waste disposal to begin in 1998. The earliest anyone forecasts that a repository at Yucca might be ready is 2010. That would make it 12 years overdue. And you call that a "fast track?"

I can attest that one thing about this project started right on time and continues today: the utilities and ratepayers in states using nuclear power have paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for the repository that was promised but not delivered.

BRIAN O' CONNELL

Editor's note: Brian O'Connell, a professional engineer, is director of the Washington-based Nuclear Waste Program Office of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.