Editorial: ‘Nevada is not for sale’

Friday, Sept. 22, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.

The idea that Nevada would agree to accept money in exchange for allowing an unsafe nuclear dump to be built anywhere within its borders is both preposterous and insulting.

Yet such an arrangement is contained within a proposal drafted for Congress' consideration by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the policy and lobbying organization of the nuclear power industry.

With the federal government's plan to bury high-level nuclear waste in Southern Nevada now catatonic because of innumerable environmental reasons, the NEI's proposal is a desperate effort to revive the project before a new presidential administration comes into power. President Bush chooses to ignore science and fully supports the nuclear industry's aggressive backing of Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The nuclear industry backs the project because its opening could allow for a spate of new nuclear plants. The industry, however, is immune to the fact that for the nearly 20 years that Yucca Mountain has been studied, never has it been deemed safe by any credible scientific report.

Establishing one or more "temporary" waste storage sites within Nevada is a main point of the NEI's bill draft. A "benefits schedule" is listed in the proposal, whereby Nevada should agree to host the facilities in exchange for $25 million a year while they were being built. Once opened and until they were closed (very likely many generations from now), the state would receive double that amount.

Bob Loux, Nevada's point man on nuclear waste, said the state was offered more money than that back in the 1980s. "The governor said then that we wouldn't trade the health and safety of Nevadans for money, and such a proposal will not work now either," Loux said Thursday. "Nevada is not for sale."

The NEI's proposal also liberally amends the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, which Congress passed to ensure strict guidelines for burial of nuclear waste. The amendments would give the Energy Department broad authority to part from national and state environmental standards in building both Yucca Mountain and temporary storage facilities.

This proposal is intended to give Congress' blessing to making an unsafe project even more unsafe. We hope members of Congress can take their minds off the lavish lobbying by the nuclear industry just long enough to reject this proposal immediately.