Editorial: Politics of nuclear waste

Saturday, April 1, 2006 | 7:19 a.m.

The Bush administration is working on a plan to expedite the opening of Yucca Mountain and intends to unveil it this month, according to a report from McClatchy News Service's Washington bureau. Details of the plan, under review by federal agencies, are not known.

What is known, however, should be of concern to every Nevadan. The Energy Department, in charge of the project to bury the nation's high-level nuclear waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain, has confirmed discussing various ideas for inclusion in the plan.

Among them is removing the congressional cap of 77,000 tons of the deadly waste that can be buried in the mountain. This is consistent with a call in February by the Nuclear Energy Institute - a Washington-based organization that lobbies on behalf of nuclear power plants - to bury as much as 115,000 tons at Yucca.

Additionally, federal officials are considering declaring Yucca Mountain an interim site for storage, meaning waste could be hauled there immediately to await a presumed opening. This would contravene Congress' original intention that no state with a site under consideration for a permanent storage facility would have to accept waste on an interim basis.

Also under consideration is taking away the power of Congress to appropriate money for Yucca Mountain through the setting of annual budgets. Ratepayers in states with nuclear power plants have been paying into a waste-storage fund that amounts to about $25 billion. The idea would be to allow the administration to appropriate the funds directly, as it sees fit.

The administration's plan has the support of energy officials around the country. The news service's story reported a meeting in Washington last week of utility executives from Minnesota, Maine and South Carolina.

LeRoy Koppendrayer, chairman of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, was quoted as saying, "We're way behind already (in opening Yucca Mountain, which was mandated by Congress to begin accepting waste by 1998). The ratepayers' money is there. Let's use it. Let's get the job done."

It is this kind of simplistic, foolish thinking that Nevada has been fighting for 20 years. Yes, the money is there, but that is far from the point. The point is safety. Nevada has shown time and again that Yucca Mountain cannot be proved to be an effective barrier against radioactive contamination of the environment. That is why, owing to lawsuits filed by Nevada, Yucca Mountain is now in limbo.

Interestingly, the administration is trying to sell the plan to Congress by saying if members approved it, a 2007 legal deadline for beginning to look for a second waste-storage site in another state will probably be long delayed. Translation: Stick it to Nevada, and you won't have to face the prospects of an unsafe nuke dump coming to your state.

Oh, the politics. Oh, the travesty.