Editorial: A ‘clean’ load of rubbish

Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005 | 8:41 a.m.

The Energy Department as much as admitted Tuesday that an aspect of its Yucca Mountain plan long criticized by Nevada was flawed. Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is where the federal government is planning to bury high-level nuclear waste from the nation's power plants and military bases. The department's acting director announced a new plan -- a "clean" plan -- for actually loading the waste in burial vaults beneath the mountain.

In the past the department has talked of building a multibillion-dollar facility near the mountain for repackaging the deadly waste once it was off-loaded either from trucks or trains. Under that plan, containers for permanent burial would have replaced the containers used to enclose the waste during transport. During this process, the waste would have been exposed, creating the potential for contaminating workers and the site.

Paul Golan, acting director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, the agency charged with building and licensing Yucca Mountain, publicly introduced the new plan in a conference call to reporters. He said the department now intends to have the waste permanently sealed in standardized containers at its point of origin, then loaded into transport containers. This way, he said, when the waste is repackaged into permanent burial casks at Yucca Mountain, it will not be directly exposed.

The Energy Department maintains this new plan will leave the Yucca Mountain site "primarily clean or uncontaminated." What this tells us is that the old plan did indeed carry risks for contamination. Can there be any doubt now about the legitimacy of Nevada's 20-year-old fight against this dangerous project?

In announcing the plan, Energy Department officials said it would make the project "simple, safer and more cost-effective," and that it would simplify the waste repository's "design, licensing and construction."

In our view, the plan changes nothing. It doesn't address the safety issues involved with transporting the waste. And it doesn't for a minute make the mountain a safer place to store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years.

No matter how knowledgeable they think they are, there are no scientists on Earth who can say with certainty what chemical reactions will take place deep inside the mountain's watery, man-made caverns once they are filled with corrodible canisters loaded with super-hot nuclear waste.

We believe the correct course is to continue storing the waste in water-cooled ponds, dry storage casks or underground tanks at nuclear power plants and specialized facilities. These methods have proven to be safe. They will be sufficient until technology advances beyond the nightmarish notion of transporting the waste all over the country, burying it under a mountain and taking the chance that it will seep into ground water and eventually work its way into the food chain.