Editorial: Yucca ode: ‘Someway, somehow…’

Thursday, July 31, 2003 | 8:49 a.m.

A good time to have produced a plan for endlessly transporting high-level nuclear waste around the country would have been 20 years ago, a year after Congress decided that the waste building up at power plants should be buried. Although no site had been picked, the plan could have addressed security, accident prevention, disaster training, and the vulnerabilities of truck, rail and barge transportation. The plan could have motivated community leaders around the nation to begin thinking about the consequences of deadly waste rolling past schools, churches, farmlands, rivers and their residents' homes.

That opportunity passed. Another opportunity arose in 1987, however, when Congress ganged up on Nevada and declared Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the ideal final resting place for waste that will still be deadly in the year 10,000. Now that a single site had been chosen for a suitability study -- albeit against strong opposition from Nevadans -- the Energy Department's first order of business should have been explaining to the nation how high-level nuclear waste from the Northeast and all other parts of the country was going to be delivered to a site in the Southwest. Well, that opportunity passed too.

Another opportunity arose early this decade, when momentum began building for Congress to approve Yucca Mountain. Certainly, before any approval could possibly be granted, Congress would have to know the full degree of jeopardy that would be faced by communities along transportation routes. But no, that opportunity passed too. Congress approved the site a year ago without having a clue about the transportation issue.

Another opportunity arose immediately after Congress' approval. But again, nothing. Now the Energy Department is casually suggesting 2006 as the year it might get around to revealing a transportation plan. With the federal government giving 2010 as the date for opening Yucca Mountain, localities will be given precious little time to prepare. Waiting until the last possible moment on a transportation plan will give new and tragic meaning to the saying "haste makes waste."