Editorial: Yucca rush is now clear

Thursday, Jan. 27, 2005 | 8:48 a.m.

Last July, in ruling on a lawsuit filed by Nevada, three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dealt Yucca Mountain what should have been a fatal blow. Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is where the federal government plans to permanently bury the deadly waste produced by the nation's nuclear power plants. The judges determined that the Energy Department had been wrong to accept a 10,000-year radiation protection standard that had been developed by the Environmental Protection Agency. They ruled the Energy Department should have instead followed a National Academy of Sciences recommendation that the mountain be constructed to safely contain the radioactive material for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Bush administration backs Yucca Mountain 100 percent. It is, however, hamstrung by the president's election-year promise to allow science and the courts to determine the future of Yucca Mountain. The administration's decision not to appeal the judges' ruling left two options for the Energy Department. It could lobby Congress to drop the requirement to abide by the National Academy's recommendation. But that's a difficult prospect, especially with Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a longtime foe of Yucca Mountain, serving as the Senate Minority Leader. Or it could try to meet the new standard by reworking the mountain's design and reconfiguring all of the construction that has already taken place over the past 15 years. If that's even possible, it would take years, possibly decades.

Yet the Energy Department, under the direction of Spencer Abraham, vowed it would still meet its 2004 deadline to apply for a federal license to open the mountain by 2010. In our view, this response to the judges' decision was proof that the Energy Department, all during Abraham's watch, had been favoring expediency over science and safety. After President Bush's re-election, Abraham announced his retirement. Bush's choice to replace him, Deputy Treasury Secretary Samuel Bodman, is now undergoing confirmation hearings.

On Wednesday Bodman conceded the truth to a Senate committee, that the Energy Department is not yet ready to apply for a license. He said the department would apply "by the end of the calendar year." He also conceded that more than half of the documents that will be submitted to the licensing agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, "are yet to be reviewed." This amounts to about 2.1 million documents.

That the Energy Department has been recklessly rushing to prematurely open Yucca Mountain should now be clear to everyone, including its supporters.