Editorial: Show us the whole nuke plan

Friday, Dec. 26, 2003 | 9:09 a.m.

Ayear and a half after Congress approved Southern Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the nation's burial site for high-level nuclear waste, the Energy Department is finally getting around to talking about a transportation plan. Logically, the transportation plan would have been the first order of business as it will affect most of the country. But then again, that would have meant hearings in dozens of villages, towns, and cities. Millions of people would have realized how close they live to routes proposed for carrying the world's deadliest material. They would have realized that because the hauling job extends infinitely into the future, accidents are inevitable. This awakening would have jeopardized the whole project, so it was important for the Yucca hawks to move forward while most of the country's population was still ignorant of the total impact.

Actually, the Energy Department is still not really talking about a transportation plan. It's just talking about one tiny sliver of it, the portion that would carry the waste over the final 300 miles. Margaret Chu, who directs the department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, tried to put a positive spin on the plan in a letter to Gov. Kenny Guinn. She pointed out that the plan for the final leg of the journey to Yucca Mountain does not utilize any rail lines going through the Las Vegas Valley.

No one in Nevada, however, is buying into the notion that there's anything positive about the plan, which was announced Tuesday. The plan has two options. The first would be to build a rail line outside of Caliente, 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The line would wind north of the Nevada Test Site and west of Nellis Air Force Base and go through four mountain ranges on its way to Yucca Mountain. The second would be to build a rail line along Interstate 80 in Northern Nevada through Carlin, and then south to Yucca Mountain.

Our main objection to the plan is that it's entirely without any context. How would the waste get to the rail line? Would it would be trucked through Clark County? Nevadans should not be deceived by the spin that the plan would take waste only through remote areas. For the Energy Department, delivering a plan in piecemeal is probably the best way to let Americans in on the news that nuclear waste will be rumbling all across the country from all directions, in many cases just a few miles from their children's bedrooms. The plan could be contained that way, informing one area at a time, gradually and with lots of spin. For the public, however, what's best would be a whole transportation plan, delivered at once. That way, a much truer picture of danger would emerge. In our view, this tiny little piece of the big picture is a farce.