Editorial: Secrecy on nuke dump

Monday, March 14, 2005 | 8:57 a.m.

We were intrigued by a story in Thursday's Las Vegas Sun about the optimism expressed by the official who is in charge of trying to get a nuclear waste dump built at Yucca Mountain, just 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Theodore Garrish, acting director of the U.S. Energy Department's Yucca Mountain program, told a Senate committee in Washington that the nuclear waste dump project is alive and well. "I believe we are better situated today than we have ever been to move forward with this program," Garrish said. That struck us as a strange thing to say, especially since the U.S. Energy Department was dealt a serious blow last July, one that very well could doom the project. A federal court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency's radiation standard for a dump at Yucca Mountain -- that radiation from the dump would have to be contained for low levels for 10,000 years -- wasn't stringent enough under federal law.

But after reading Friday's edition of the Sun, we started to get a better understanding of why Garrish is so bullish on Yucca Mountain. Washington bureau chief Benjamin Grove reported that environmental groups, which participated in a closed-door briefing with EPA officials last week, believe that the options the EPA are considering for a new radiation standard aren't that much different than the one tossed out by the court. A standard meeting the court's ruling would require preventing the release of radiation for at least 100,000 years.

That benchmark likely is unachievable, which is why federal agencies may be trying to skirt having to establish a tough, meaningful standard that would protect public safety. "My impression was that they are going to do what they want to do," said Peggy Maze Johnson, director of Nevada-based Citizen Alert, who participated in the briefing via a telephone hookup. "They don't care about putting waste in a mountain that leaks."

Officials from the EPA, the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which ultimately would have to rule on the Energy Department's application to build a dump, have been meeting secretly regarding the Yucca Mountain project. Officials from these federal agencies have sought to downplay what's been occurring, but it's clear what is going on. These agencies are collaborating to see if there is a way to create a new radiation standard that isn't too strict and, most importantly, will allow Yucca Mountain to proceed.

That Nevada officials have been excluded from these closed-door meetings, despite the fact that our state would be the nation's permanent dumping ground for 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, confirms that something nefarious is happening. If ever there were an issue that demanded openness, it certainly would involve meetings involving high-level nuclear waste. Instead, we get secrecy by federal agencies hell-bent on burying man's deadliest waste near the nation's fastest-growing city. It's not just a disgrace -- it's a scandal.