Editorial: State draws Yucca blood

Friday, July 9, 2004 | 6:22 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

July 10 - 11, 2004

The news often hasn't been upbeat for Nevadans in the more than two decades that the state has sought to fend off the federal government's efforts to bury high-level nuclear waste here. But on Friday the state of Nevada scored a major victory in federal court. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected some of the state's arguments against building a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, the court importantly sided with the state and environmental groups in finding that a critical radiation standard for the planned dump was incorrectly established and that this flaw must be corrected. The decision has the potential to turn the tide in the state's uphill battle against Yucca.

The court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency, in setting safety regulations for the proposed dump, didn't follow a crucial recommendation made by the National Academy of Sciences. The federal Energy Policy Act mandates that the EPA must set its safety standards for Yucca Mountain "based upon and consistent" with the recommendations of the Academy. While the EPA said that 10,000 years was a long enough period of time to safely contain the dump's radiation so it couldn't harm the public, the Academy said it wasn't. The Academy said that it would be longer than 10,000 years before the nuclear waste was at its peak radiation. The environmental group National Resources Defense Council estimates that peak might not occur for another 300,000 years.

It was good to see the federal appeals court rebuke an agency for not doing its job regarding Yucca Mountain, especially since President Bush and Republican leaders in Congress have been more than happy to please the nuclear power industry, which has fought like mad to get the dump in Nevada approved. "It would have been one thing had EPA taken the Academy's recommendations into account and then tailored a standard that accommodated the agency's policy concerns," the court wrote. "But that is not what the EPA did. Instead, it unabashedly rejected NAS's (the National Academy of Sciences') findings, and then went on to promulgate a dramatically different standard, one that the Academy had expressly rejected."

Even if the EPA goes back and rewrites the regulation to satisfy the Academy, it's still impossible to imagine that the Energy Department could then come up with a dump design that would meet such a high standard. A new plan would certainly require billions of more dollars, a scenario that could doom the dump financially.

It's been obvious all along that Yucca Mountain is an unsafe location to bury 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. It hasn't been easy, however, getting others to heed Nevada's concerns, especially for those states that have nuclear power plants and want to get rid of their waste at any cost. And while the battle is far from over, for now at least we can take considerable comfort in this important court decision.