Editorial: Rate Yucca the same as Skull Valley

Wednesday, March 12, 2003 | 8:48 a.m.

Nuclear power company executives persuaded Congress that the desert around Yucca Mountain northwest of Las Vegas in Southern Nevada is expendable for the rest of time as a burial site for their radioactive waste. Apparently regarding all desert land in the West as barren wasteland, they confidently proposed a temporary storage site for their high-level nuclear waste in Utah, at the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley. And why shouldn't they have? The Energy Department, Congress and President Bush have all linked arms with them in a merry dance around the Yucca maypole. An above-ground storage facility in Utah, which would function until the Yucca site in Southern Nevada opened, must have sounded like a shoo-in.

Well, surprise surprise. The licensing board of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission turned down the proposal because the desert, or at least the sky above it, is more than just a wasteland, after all. Pilots at Hill Air Force Base north of Salt Lake City use the sky above the proposed site for training. Members of the licensing board feared what would happen if a plane crashed into the stockpiled waste. Of course, it would be a disaster of the first order. Any breach of the spent fuel's storage casks could send radiation to the four winds, endangering the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people. (Kind of like what would happen if an accident were to strike a truckload or trainload of nuclear waste on its way to Yucca Mountain).

The natural question, therefore, is how Yucca Mountain, which lies within the Nellis Air Force Base Range, could ever be considered safe. If Skull Valley is not appropriate as a temporary site for nuclear waste storage because of the danger from above, how could Yucca, a permanent site, be free of the same danger? One answer that will be floated is that the waste at Skull Valley was proposed for above-ground storage. Yucca Mountain is being designed for underground storage. Yet with multiple large shipments of waste arriving daily at Yucca, there could be on any given day thousands of tons piled up outside, awaiting entombment.

The Air Force reported in 2001 that the skies over Yucca Mountain were the scene of 20,000 military flights a year. That's 20,000 chances a year for utter disaster. We hope the NRC remembers its rationale for denying Skull Valley when it deliberates over a license for Yucca.