Editorial: Troubling development

Monday, Feb. 28, 2005 | 8:59 a.m.

Last week an advisory board to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommended approval of a temporary, above-ground nuclear waste storage facility at an Indian reservation in Utah. Eight utilities that use nuclear power want to send 44,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste to a temporary facility in Utah until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they hope, gives its approval to a permanent dump proposed for Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

So what would it mean for Nevada -- specifically, the federal government's plans to bury 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, just 90 miles away from Las Vegas -- if the Utah facility were to open? It's possible that some members of Congress and the nuclear power industry, which is becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress at Yucca Mountain, could find it enticing to just leave nuclear waste in Utah and give up on Yucca Mountain. But a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying arm for the nuclear power industry, says the industry is committed to opening Yucca Mountain as a permanent site. It's hard for us to think of a time when we've trusted nuclear power industry executives on just about anything, but on this point we would tend to take them at their word.

Indeed, while the nuclear power industry has lately acknowledged that temporary, above-ground storage of nuclear waste is a necessity given the delays in work at Yucca Mountain, the reality is that this is a battle that the industry has spent billions of dollars on -- and we don't see it meekly going away. We expect that the industry, and its yes-men in Congress, will remain just as ruthless as ever in trying to send man's deadliest waste to Nevada -- no matter how dangerous it would be to transport it by truck and train -- and, ultimately, bury it here, in a seismically active earthquake zone. We can only hope that the Utah plan will awaken the public, and those who live in the cities and towns in the Midwest, East and South along the routes where the waste would travel, to the dangers involved. That is about the only silver lining that we can see from la st week's development.