Critics tackle a mountain of comments on Yucca

Benjamin Grove

Sunday, Dec. 4, 2005 | 1:20 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Yucca Mountain has been the focus of controversies big and small . Call the latest Commentgate. At issue: Just how many public comments were submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency about its draft radiation standard for the proposednuclear waste repository?

The EPA is reviewing the comments before making the proposed standard final . The agency had posted 186 comments as of Friday (the comment d is over). But several Yucca activists say there are far more than that.

Five of the comments are marked as "mass comment campaigns" organized by anti-Yucca groups including Citizen Alert in Nevada and the Washington-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service, in which people signed identical postcards and e-mails. A total of 2,259 people took part in the campaigns. Citizen Alert leader Peggy Maze Johnson said the EPA should count each as an individual comment even if they are identical, which would mean an overwhelming majority of the comments opposed the standard.

Another controversy: The EPA had posted the public comments on its Web site until last weekend when the posts suddenly disappeared, prompting Yucca critics to wonder if their criticisms had been trashed already.

Conspiracy? No, the EPA said. Just bureaucracy.

The comments were moved to a government documents clearing house at www.regulations.gov. But the comments last week were not easily found. Users must navigate a complex search and they must know to type in the Yucca docket ID number -- OAR-2005-0083 -- into the Web sites search engine.

"Its just nuts," Johnson said.

"They dont make it easy to be an informed or concerned citizen."

An EPA spokeswoman apologized for moving the comments without notice and for the comments being so hard to find. "Sometimes there are a few glitches in the system," spokeswoman Suzanne Ackerman said.

The Politics of Iraq

The House returns to Washington this week after a Thanksgiving recess amid heightened political tensions over Iraq (the Senate is due back next week). As expected, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., continued to trade barbs with Republicans during the holiday break. After a widely anticipated Bush speech at the Naval Academy last week, Reid said the president had "missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home."

The Republican National Committees research department fired an e-mail about Reid to reporters under the heading "Senator Sieve." It contained the words of conservative columnist John Fund who blasted Reid for telling a Nevada television news program that he had been informed that Osama bin Laden was killed in the Pakistan earthquake.

"Heres hoping al-Qaida figures arent soon appearing on Al Jazeera television chortling about the clueless Mr. Reid," Fund wrote.

Reids PR Machine

As an extension of Reids communications war room efforts, Senate Democrats have primed their public relations operation in advance of a muchanticipated roll-out of a sweeping new party agenda expected in January, Roll Call reported. The plan includes a new media booking effort to get more Senate Democrats on radio and cable television talk shows to compete with Republicans, the Capitol Hill newspaper reported. Democratic leaders are keeping careful notes about who appears and who doesnt -- 32 senators appeared on 175 cable shows and 73 radio programs between Oct. 3 and Nov. 18, aides to Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., told Roll Call.

There is overt pressure to join the effort: Democratic senators at a weekly party lunch are subjected to a "highlight" video of senators who best delivered the party message in speeches and interviews that week.

Waste Reprocessing Concerns

Some prominent scientists and public policy experts are shocked that some members of Congress are giddy over the prospects of "reprocessing," or recycling, nuclear waste. Congress this year set aside $50 million to research the controversial technology that removes plutonium from waste and could reduce the toxicity of waste bound for Yucca Mountain.

The process has not been used in this country largely because of fears of whether the plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists. Some experts outside Congress say there is no reason to pursue the technology. Last week a three-member panel at a Federation of American Scientists conference in Washington said reprocessing is expensive, unnecessary, and undermines U.S. efforts to reduce proliferation of nuclear material.

The government is going to have a difficult time telling other countries not to reprocess if it kickstarts its own program, said Steve Fetter, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

It would be "catastrophic" to U.S. nonproliferation policy, agreed Frank N. von Hippel, co-director of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. "It certainly doesnt make economic sense," he added.

Reprocessing is being wrongly viewed by some as a solution to the "political problem" that is Yucca Mountain, said Ernest Moniz, head of the Physics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also added that there was no "technical pressure" to put waste underground at Yucca, just political pressure. The panel members generally agreed that storing waste at above-ground interim waste sites was a good waste solution.

Benjamin Grove can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at grove@lasvegassun.com.

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