Friday, Jan. 28, 2005 | 5:45 a.m.
Jeff German's column appears Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in the Sun. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4067.
WEEKEND EDITION
January 29 - 30, 2005
Back in November I was convinced that President Bush's re-election would take the wind out of Nevada's epic fight against Yucca Mountain.
Bush is the president who, without having the scientific facts, concluded in 2002 that it was safe to store 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain repository, 90 miles from Las Vegas. Congress then voted to send us the nation's radioactive garbage by 2010.
If anything, however, the spirit of the undermanned Nevada forces is surprisingly optimistic. There is a feeling that victory is at hand.
Bob Loux, Nevada's top nuclear waste watchdog, believes the state won the fight in July when a Washington appeals court panel tossed out a 10,000-year radiation safety standard for Yucca Mountain that had been developed by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The three-judge panel ruled that the Energy Department should have followed the law and set a stricter standard recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. The academy says Yucca Mountain should be designed to protect Nevadans for hundreds of thousands of years.
It's a standard, Nevada forces say, the government, after two decades of studying the mountain site, simply can't meet.
Only through an act of Congress can the Bush administration circumvent the court's ruling and change the law to allow a much looser standard. That's turning out to be a big hurdle for the administration, with Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who's as politically savvy as anyone on Capitol Hill, entrenched as the Democratic minority leader.
"I think the fight is over," Loux says. "But I don't think they've recognized it yet."
Joe Egan, Nevada's lead lawyer on the legal front in Washington, isn't willing to proclaim victory like Loux.
But Egan, who persuaded the appeals court to issue its pivotal ruling in July, says the Energy Department and the nuclear industry are definitely on the run.
"The entire Yucca Mountain program is in mass chaos," he says. "Every single phase of the program is in trouble."
For one thing, the complicated Yucca Mountain licensing process has been set back.
Without a safer radiation standard, there's no way the Energy Department can win approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open the underground dump.
Department officials also have acknowledged that they're way behind in reviewing the mass of scientific documents expected to be contained in the application. More than 2 million documents still need to be studied.
And last week the Energy Department sent out mixed messages as to when it will submit its application, which was supposed to have been filed a month ago.
Energy Secretary nominee Samuel Bodman informed Congress that the application would be submitted at the end of the year.
But then word surfaced that the department only planned to request about $650 million for its budget this year, which is about half of what it needs to move forward with the application process.
"I think they're moving backwards, not forward," says Peggy Maze Johnson, the executive director of Citizen Alert, an anti-Yucca Mountain group. "These people have absolutely no clue what they're doing."
The latest reason for optimism, according to Egan, is talk within the nuclear industry itself that a centralized location to store high-level waste at Yucca Mountain no longer is essential to the industry's desire to build more power plants.
Some utilities, Egan says, already have filed permits to build new nuclear plants and are working on plans to increase waste storage at existing plants.
It's a fundamental change in ideology that buys Nevada more time to fight Yucca Mountain.
It also buys the country more time to find either another waste storage solution or a site that actually is suitable to store the deadly waste -- far away from Nevada.
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