Sunday, April 16, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman visited Southern Nevada for two days late last week on a trip highlighted by a tour of Yucca Mountain. Although his white hard hat was inscribed "Secretary Bodman," it could just as easily have said "Vice President Cheney," or "President Bush." Bodman is not an independent-thinking policymaker who relies on facts and science. Rather, he is an administrator who travels the country parroting the White House.
Speaking to reporters after emerging from Yucca Mountain's five-mile tunnel that so far has cost $9 billion, Bodman spoke as if he were reading verbatim from the collected talking points of Bush/Cheney. It was a sad sight, considering how promising his academic career had begun. In the late 1960s he was a chemical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Although he went into the financial and political fields after that, leading to deputy positions in the Bush administration's Commerce and Treasury departments, we had dared hope after he was nominated for his current job in December 2004 that he would offer the president straight advice on Yucca Mountain based on science.
Such hope is quickly dashed by the Bush administration. Bodman's remarks to reporters showed that he is fully on board with the real energy secretaries, Bush and Cheney. He said the White House's new legislation on Yucca Mountain is wise policy.
"The legislation will allow us to provide stability, provide clarity, as well as predictability to the Yucca Mountain project," Bodman said. What the legislation actually portends is a porous mountain overstuffed with nuclear waste, a Congress taken out of the funding picture and a nightmarish transportation scheme.
Bodman said putting Yucca Mountain on a fast track will enable more nuclear power plants to be built. In fact, if the federal government is successful in opening Yucca, it would be filled with existing and future waste from the current nuclear power plants. Where would waste from new plants go?
Bodman even reiterated the old Bush/Cheney saw that Yucca won't open if it can't be made safe, proving that he believes Nevadans are still gullible six years after Bush's infamous "sound science" promise.
Work on Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, should be stopped cold.
There are no scientists in the world, much less administrators and politicians, who can truthfully say that more than 132,000 tons of nuclear waste can be buried there and pose no safety risks for hundreds of thousands of years.
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