Editorial: A bungling for all to see

Saturday, Dec. 10, 2005 | 7:23 a.m.

The Energy Department this week said that another billion dollars would be needed to develop Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump. The announcement was just another admission of ineptitude in the federal government's long and bungled history of this project.

A California agency acknowledged the tangled mess last month when it asked for a partial refund on the billion-plus dollars that utility ratepayers in the state have paid into a federal fund dedicated to paying for Yucca Mountain.

"The federal waste disposal program remains plagued with licensing delays, increasing costs, technical challenges and managerial problems," a report by the California Energy Commission said.

Since 1982 consumers of nuclear-generated electricity have paid a little extra in their power bills to fund the safe storage of radioactive waste. At that time, Congress promised to have a permanent storage facility opened by 1998. Southern Nevada's Yucca Mountain was chosen in 1987 as the sole site for the facility.

Nevada immediately protested and over the years has demonstrated in studies and legal filings that Yucca Mountain is geologically unsafe for such a use. The state's arguments have prevented Yucca Mountain from opening, although the Energy Department clings to the notion that it can begin operating a facility there sometime after 2012.

The California Energy Commission wants to use its ratepayers' money for a more sound solution -- storing waste safely on site at its two nuclear power plants. We agree that on-site storage should continue until a safe, permanent solution is found.

Another terrible risk involving Yucca Mountain is transportation of the waste to the site from all parts of the country. The final leg would be a 319-mile railroad the Energy Department proposes to build through rugged, undeveloped terrain west of Caliente to Yucca Mountain. Caliente is a small town 130 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

The Energy Department has said all along that this railroad would cost $1 billion. But on Wednesday it changed that to $2 billion. (Given the department's penchant for understating Yucca Mountain's costs, we expect even that figure to soon be revised upward.) The Energy Department's financial and scientific inaccuracies are so common regarding Yucca Mountain that even Congress, which approved the project in 2002 by a large majority, is cutting the dump's construction budget.

The California Energy Commission this month will ask that state's Legislature to endorse its call for a refund. We agree with Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., who hopes the California Legislature obliges and who also hopes that other states begin asking for refunds.

The project is too managerially flawed and too scientifically unsafe to receive another penny.