Editorial: Untenable deadline

Thursday, Jan. 22, 2004 | 8:48 a.m.

This week the Energy Department reaffirmed its commitment to meet a year-end deadline to submit an application to bury 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in Southern Nevada. But on Wednesday the Sun reported that the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which met this week in Las Vegas, is concerned about the deadline. Some members of the board, an independent scientific body that offers advice about the Yucca Mountain project to the federal government, wondered whether the pressure imposed by the deadline may lead to safety questions being overlooked. The board's concerns include the possibility of the waste containers corroding and terrorist threats when the waste is shipped and after it is on-site.

The 1986 Challenger disaster, and the subsequent probe that discovered that political pressure to meet deadlines contributed to launching the shuttle during unsafe conditions, was on the mind of board member Mark Abkowitz. He asked W. John Arthur III, deputy director of repository development at the Energy Department, about the department's internal communication policies and whether employees feel free to report concerns they might have. Arthur said the Energy Department is working to improve the dialogue about potential problems, including the creation of a leadership council within the agency.

It's awfully late in the game to be creating such a "leadership council" -- that should have happened on day one of the project. Further, because Yucca Mountain is supposed to safely contain man's deadliest waste, trying to ram this application through to completion within a year couldn't be more irresponsible. The deadline, for safety's sake, should be scrapped.