Editorial: Tide turning against Yucca

Friday, Dec. 16, 2005 | 7:42 a.m.

The Nevada and Utah congressional delegations are sponsoring legislation that would eliminate the need for the Yucca Mountain project by instead requiring that nuclear waste be stored on-site at the power plants where it is generated. By leaving it there, where it can be stored safely for at least another hundred years, the federal government can rationally find an alternative to Yucca Mountain, a site fraught with intractable problems.

Now it might seem bold of the two states to introduce this legislation, since it was just three years ago that Congress approved President Bush's proposal to build a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain. But in the relatively short span of time since the Bush administration rammed its plan through Congress, much has happened to further jeopardize the proposal to permanently entomb 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in Nevada.

A little more than a year ago the U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency's radiation standard for Yucca Mountain was nowhere near as strict as it should be in protecting the public from dangerous releases of radiation. Then serious allegations surfaced earlier this year that the U.S. Geological Survey had falsified data involving how fast water can travel through the mountain and potentially corrode the canisters containing nuclear waste. And just a month ago, Sen. Pete Domenici, R.-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy Committee and one of Yucca Mountain's leading proponents, let loose with some of his harshest language ever about the project, saying "it was not a good solution either on straight science, or surely, on economic grounds."

It also is telling that officials from Utah, a state in which an Indian tribe is courting nuclear utilities to store nuclear waste there until Yucca Mountain's fate is decided, are joining Nevada's fight. When Congress approved Bush's Yucca Mountain plan in 2002, Utah's two senators supported the plan -- but now they oppose it.

The latest legislative salvo reminds us yet again of how important it is to not give an inch and maintain the fight against the federal government's irresponsible and dangerous efforts to bury nuclear waste in Nevada.