Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2004 | 10:21 a.m.
By Brian Sandoval
WEEKEND EDITION
September 11 - 12, 2004
Brian Sandoval, a Republican, is attorney general of Nevada.
It is unfortunate that the debate in Nevada over Yucca Mountain has drifted into election-year politics. Because, if you haven't noticed, Nevada has recently won several crucial legal battles, and, as a result, the project will soon collapse under its own ill-conceived weight. It will do so irrespective of politics.
Allow me to summarize some of our successes. In July a federal appeals court ruled that the federal government had "unabashedly rejected" sound science in setting the radiation standards for the repository. It overturned the Environmental Protection Agency's rules for the repository, and it overturned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing rules for the project.
Last week the full D.C. Court of Appeals denied the nuclear industry's petition for rehearing, voting 7-0. The mandate of the court will shortly take effect, with the result that the Yucca project will have no regulatory infrastructure. The rejected regulations took a decade to develop.
That's not all Nevada won at the court of appeals. The court denied the federal government's claim that all environmental issues surrounding the project were moot, and invited Nevada to file as many environmental challenges as it wants. Last week I filed the first such lawsuit, contesting the transportation decisions made by the Energy Department, including its decision to construct in Nevada the longest new rail line in America in 80 years. It is important to note that many of the proposed waste shipments would go through Las Vegas.
In Congress this summer, the efforts of Nevada's delegation apparently helped solidify an 85 percent slashing of the Yucca budget for the new fiscal year -- the critical year when the government was supposed to file an application for a construction permit.
In federal court in Las Vegas this year, Nevada successfully preserved the state's claims against the federal government for the massive amounts of water Yucca will use. Without water, the project cannot even be constructed.
In that same court, a powerful class action lawsuit is pending against Energy Department contractors who built the exploratory tunnels at Yucca, contending workers and visitors were grossly overexposed to toxic mineral dusts through corruption, fraud and concealment. Several workers are already dying, and liability to the project's builders and the Energy Department, which may have to indemnify them, may be enormous. And to build Yucca at least another hundred miles of tunnels will have to be dug. Who will dig them? The workforce no longer trusts the department.
There's more. In the Energy Department's first-ever appearance before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month on issues concerning mismanagement of millions of Yucca documents, a three-judge Hearing Board granted every request by Nevada's attorneys. The board threw out the federal government's "certification of compliance" with applicable rules, which was supposed to have triggered a whole sequence of events to commence construction. Now it will take at least a year for the Energy Department to regroup.
More important is the signal this case sent. After years of flouting and changing its own rules to cure its failures, the Energy Department now has to meet someone else's rules. Its first experiment was a disaster. Indeed, I'm told that the board's 61-page decision is the most scathing ever issued in an NRC licensing proceeding.
Notwithstanding Nevada's victories and the federal government's failures, the Energy Department insists it will file a construction application for Yucca by the end of the year. If and when that application is ever docketed, Nevada will be ready to counter it with a full-court press in a three-year proceeding in Las Vegas. The state's technical experts and attorneys are preparing up to 200 scientific challenges. Of these, there are dozens which, taken alone, would kill the project if granted by NRC's judges.
Many will depict glaring, embarrassing technical errors by the federal government, such as underestimating the probability of a volcano at Yucca by a factor of 10, or using the wrong water to test the corrosion of waste containers in the mountain. It is this proceeding that will, in fact, test the soundness of the science used at Yucca. We expect to prevail on the merits, and to do so resoundingly.
Some in Nevada, prodded by nuclear industry lobbyists, have suggested the state should throw in the towel and negotiate for unspecified "benefits" from the federal government for hosting Yucca. But Nevada is winning this war. And those benefits, whatever they might be, will not make the repository safe.
A state's first duty is to safeguard its citizens, and, as the attorney general of Nevada, I am convinced that the Yucca Project is unsafe. Therefore, I will exhaust every remedy at my disposal to defeat it.
Nevada has recently enjoyed important legal victories, but it is incumbent upon everyone in this fight to remain steadfast in our commitment to work together and prove to the world that the project poses unacceptable risks to the health, safety and welfare of our citizens and the environment.
The final battle over Yucca, at the NRC, will prove that a safe repository cannot be built in the porous volcanic rock that constitutes Yucca Mountain. If the project has not collapsed by then, this final battle will expose it for being the ill-considered project that it is.
archive
