Editorial: There is no nuclear nirvana

Sunday, Jan. 29, 2006 | 8:10 a.m.

President Bush has been using high oil and natural gas prices, and concerns over generating electricity from dirty coal, to boost his campaign for more nuclear power plants. Now he is adding another justification -- an immediate future in which technology will triumph over nuclear waste.

Bush is putting $250 million into his fiscal 2007 budget as a startup fund to initiate waste reprocessing, a technology abandoned in the 1970s by President Jimmy Carter. Reprocessing at that time resulted in an end product of pure plutonium, from which nuclear weapons can be made. The fear was that security lapses could result in the plutonium getting into the wrong hands.

But technology today offers the promise of an end product that is a mixture of plutonium and another element, the Bush administration asserts. This new mixture would supposedly be more secure because it would be almost impossible to handle by anyone except specially trained technicians.

We believe Bush is being deceptive in citing this technology to advance his push for resuming construction of nuclear power plants after a 35-year hiatus. Nuclear plants sprang up around the country in the 1950s and 1960s amid optimism that technology would quickly solve the problem of highly radioactive waste.

The country should not repeat that mistake. This latest reprocessing technology is far from proven. In fact, many scientists say it will be years, perhaps decades, before it will be ready for testing. If dozens more nuclear power plants are built during that time, and the technology proves unworkable or too expensive, what does that mean for Yucca Mountain?

Ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas and under construction as the country's only burial site for nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain is now stalled, owing to Nevada's persuasive arguments that it wouldn't be safe.

With even more nuclear power plants up and running based on the false premise of a wondrous new technology, the pressure to open, and even expand, Yucca Mountain could become overwhelming.

This would imperil the safety of Southern Nevadans, who should let Washington know that they aren't optimistic about reprocessing.

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