Editorial: Discord mounts on Yucca

Saturday, Nov. 26, 2005 | 7:21 a.m.

The state of Nevada and its congressional delegation, with support from an overwhelming majority of its residents, has spent 20 years fighting the federal government's plan to haul high-level nuclear waste from the nation's power plants and permanently bury it 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain. And for all of that time, the state has stood its ground virtually alone.

In 2002 Nevada's fight reached a low point. President Bush approved the Energy Department's recommendation of Yucca Mountain and the House and Senate added their approvals. Nevada, however, kept up its fight and filed lawsuits, striking gold last year when a federal court ruled that Yucca Mountain was being built to the wrong radiation standard, a key safety issue. The finding sapped a lot of the pro-Yucca momentum, forcing the Energy Department into an indefinite delay in filing for a license to operate the facility.

Since that ruling there have been more developments tilting toward Nevada's position, which maintains that transporting the waste to Yucca would be a grave risk and that storage inside the mountain poses an unacceptably high chance that air and ground water would become contaminated.

In September, after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted to approve a temporary nuclear dump in his state, Utah Sen. Robert Bennett saw the light on Yucca. The Republican Bennett had long been an ardent supporter of the project. "However much the idea of a single repository may have made sense decades ago, it is now clear that it does not make sense, and we need to move in some future direction," Bennett said in a Senate speech.

Another Yucca blow came earlier this month, when Congress slashed funding for the dump. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, at the time hinted that he was reassessing his long support for Yucca. He said the cuts to the project were the "beginning of a re-evaluation of a bigger policy, which will include Yucca."

From the day in 1987 when Yucca Mountain was chosen as the site for burying nuclear waste, Domenici has been one the project's most passionate supporters. But he didn't sound like that on Wednesday when he addressed a group of nuclear power leaders.

"As most of you know, (Yucca) was not a good solution either on straight science, or surely, on economic grounds," Domenici told the group in a stunning change from his past remarks. Domenici went on to make other disparaging statements about Yucca.

It's far too early to believe that the fight against Yucca Mountain has been won. But Congress and the Energy Department are now working on a new waste policy, one that won't be released until next year. We believe the new policy should call for storing nuclear waste at the power plants where it is produced until there is a solution that doesn't involve Yucca Mountain.