Editorial: So, why is Yucca work continuing?

Friday, Feb. 18, 2005 | 4:17 a.m.

February 19 - 20, 2005

In the years that the federal government was steamrolling along on its plans to open Yucca Mountain, it offered ready justification for its unrelenting determination. The deadly nuclear waste piling up at the nation's power plants was becoming dangerous, the Energy Department warned, echoing nuclear power officials. It said the plants were running out of room, making a permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain an urgent national priority. The waste will be safe at one, secure location, instead of being scattered around the country offering multiple targets for terrorists, Americans were told. Of equal concern was the nation's power supply. Until Yucca Mountain was operating, offering a solution to the problem of nuclear waste disposal, no new nuclear power plants could be built, the Energy Department and nuclear power officials argued.

But where are those arguments now -- now that the government's steamroller has all but ground to a halt against the obstacles this newspaper and other critics of the Yucca Mountain project have foreseen all along? The Energy Department has largely gone silent while the eager-to-expand nuclear power industry speaks loudly of alternatives to Yucca Mountain, located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Today, the word is that onsite storage of nuclear waste at power plants can continue. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing a plan presented by a group of utilities to store waste above ground on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, Utah.

This kind of talk is gaining momentum as the Yucca Mountain project sinks deeper into its rut. It is mired in millions of documents that do not satisfactorily answer all of the scientific questions about the mountain's safety. A federal court ruling rejecting the project's plan to contain radiation has the Energy Department stymied. The project's opening date has been pushed back two years. The prospects for Yucca Mountain ever to open are dwindling.

So how are Congress and the Bush administration reacting? By pushing aside the old standby that Yucca Mountain is needed before building more nuclear power plants. The nuclear power industry expects a federal go-ahead -- and federal subsidies -- in time so that new plants can be under construction by 2010. Waste be damned, Congress and President Bush seem to be saying.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., an ardent supporter of Yucca Mountain and chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, spoke to about 200 nuclear power executives last week in Washington. "Despite difficulties and concerns about whether it ultimately will work, we still have to move step by step toward Yucca Mountain," he told the gathering.

But why? The reasons for building it are crumbling by the minute.