Columnist Jon Ralston: Real politics, fake science

Friday, April 8, 2005 | 5:06 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.

WEEKEND EDITION

April 9 - 10, 2005

"I believe sound science, and not politics, must prevail in the designation of any high-level nuclear waste repository."

-- Presidential candidate George W. Bush, May 3, 2000

"Science by peer pressure is dangerous but sometime (sic) it is necessary."

-- E-mail from government employee, April 2, 1999

As we near the five-year anniversary of the president's first lie about Yucca Mountain, the rationale that George W. Bush and many before him have used to send nuclear waste here is unraveling.

I know what many of you are thinking: We've heard this before. Here comes the rhetoric. Nothing has changed.

I understand the cynicism -- I have shared it. Like any sentient Southern Nevadan, I would rather not have 77,000 tons of radioactive waste just a short groundwater travel from our homes. But I have long considered it inevitable because of the politics by peer pressure and the federal government's $50 billion-dollar political imperative -- if we spend it, we must build it. So like many, I have become inured to years of hyperventilation by critics and bloviating by politicians.

But now, with the disclosure of the apparently faked science at the proposed dump site, the rhetoric has morphed into reality, the style has become substance. The tip of the iceberg has become the iceberg with the revelation of e-mails that indicate the science was not just unsound, but not science at all.

And this unsound science story is more than just a few rogue employees. Ninety pages of e-mails have been found and the words are frightening -- "I will be happy to make up more stuff" or "If they really want the stuff they'll have to pay to do it right."

It's counterintuitive to believe this is just confined to water equipment calibration -- but even if it were, that would be enough. Yucca Mountain is a crapshoot as it is -- no man-made project like this one has ever been attempted so it's all guesswork. And now, it appears, phony guesses, too.

The politics here are replete with irony.

After years of Republicans being pummeled for rolling over on Yucca, it is a GOP member of Congress, Rep. Jon Porter, who has provided a national stage where the denouement may play out. With all the talk of Harry Reid's ascension as the Senate's most powerful Democrat, who would have guessed that sophomore Porter's quiet assignment to a subcommittee no one has ever heard of (the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce and Agency Organization of the Government Reform Committee) would provide the venue where a death blow could be struck?

Let's face it: Amid all the obnoxious blather that politicians here have spouted about the dump not being a partisan issue, it always has been a partisan issue. The Republicans love to point out that a Democrat, J. Bennett Johnston, passed the original Screw Nevada Bill, and that the Clinton administration proceeded apace with the permanent dump.

Much of that has come in defense of GOP Congresses that have relentlessly tried to speed up the dump and a president in Bush who has nuclear industry cronies in his inner circle, including the head of the Edison Electric Institute, and whose administration has a former industry leader (Ted Garrish) overseeing the Yucca Mountain Project.

Although plenty of Democrats support Yucca Mountain and have voted against it only as a favor to Reid, and while Clinton did not lift a finger to slow the permanent dump (despite his veto of interim storage), no single person has been as hostile to the state as Bush. And the state's Republicans have shown themselves to be members of the Prostrate Party, especially during Campaign '04, as Bush once again patronized Nevada and offered similar "sound science" sops when he came here.

(One Democratic wag brutally refers to Gov. Kenny Guinn and Attorney General Brian Sandoval, who politely agreed to disagree with the president many times last year, as the Blandocracy.)

The tension between the two parties here surfaced during Porter's hearing last week when Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley tried to pin down Guinn on when he would go tell the president to change his mind. You may recall that before Bush signed Yucca Mountain into law three years ago, he gave Guinn and the GOP delegation an audience for a few minutes and then went forward. It was embarrassing and pathetic.

After pointing out the DOE has been dismissive of the e-mails and said it would plow ahead, Berkley, during the hearing, turned to Guinn and wondered, "What are you planning to do to take our message to the president so that he gets an unfiltered and correct version of what's going on?"

Surely not thrilled, Guinn's locutions involved many circumlocutions before he declared, "I assure you that we will be working to get another sit-down, face-to-face discussion with the president of the United States because the facts have changed, and this is no doubt about that."

But the governor also, inexplicably, expressed confidence in Bush because of that first meeting three years ago: "In my meeting with him he was very firm and I know him from our governor days and I know him to be a man who is fair and certainly convinced to do the things in his mind from a scientific basis. He told me he would only make his decision on scientific data and sound science."

Or whatever kind of science they can manufacture. One of the e-mails compared the Yucca Mountain study to the O.J. Simpson trial. (If we can make the science fit, we can build it?) But even scarier is this proposition:

If their fakeries and subsequent cover-up were so pathetically constructed as to become porous after just a few years, what does that say about their ability to build a dump that's impenetrable for thousands of years?

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