Editorial: Divide and conquer

Tuesday, March 1, 2005 | 9:08 a.m.

Utah's governor and U.S. senators have been scrambling over the past few days in the wake of a federal panel's decision last week that could result in 44,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste being sent to Utah. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a Republican, told White House officials that Utah would continue to fight plans by eight utilities to build a nuclear-waste dump on an Indian reservation in his state. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said that while he "strongly disagreed" with the recommendation by an advisory board to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that a dump be built, he said he had expected it. "There seems to be a bias within the NRC in favor of the nuclear industry," Hatch said, certainly earning him an early nomination for the Understatement of the Year Award.

We have plenty of sympathy for the residents of Utah, because we believe it would be dangerous to ship nuclear waste to Utah and store it there -- even temporarily as is proposed. But that sympathy doesn't extend to Utah's U.S. senators, who stuck it to our state on nuclear waste storage in 2002 when they voted for President Bush's plan to permanently bury nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Utah's senators did so after receiving a pledge from the Bush administration that it wouldn't seek to use federal funds to store nuclear waste in Utah on a temporary basis. The senators' sleazy pact with Bush came despite the fact that Nevada had consistently supported Utah officials in opposing a temporary dump in Utah. They decided to cut and run rather than display unity with Nevada and other states by fighting Bush's policy of turning the West into a nuclear dumping ground.

It's still possible that Bush will block nuclear waste from heading to Utah, but Utah residents should understand what Nevadans have come to realize about the president and his relationship with the nuclear power industry: The industry gets its way on nuclear waste storage, no matter how unsafe it is to transport man's deadliest waste and bury it.

Utah, welcome to Nevada's world.