Editorial: Another Yucca failure

Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2007 | 6:57 a.m.

Energy Department officials once again are making false claims that they are ready to move ahead with plans to dump the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada.

Today the department will ask a panel of three administrative law judges for approval to apply for a license to build the dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain.

To do that, the judges must find the department is ready. The law requires the department to submit all of its materials supporting the application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission six months before applying for a license.

This is familiar territory for the judges and the Energy Department. In 2004 the same three judges denied the department's request to move ahead because of the department's failure to comply with the law. The judges faulted the department for failing to provide all the documents it planned to use in arguing its case for Yucca Mountain, and they should find the same thing this time around.

As Lisa Mascaro reported in Saturday's Las Vegas Sun, the department has sent the commission roughly 30 million pages of information but has failed to include some vitally important documents. Among the missing documents is the massive multivolume report that details how the dump is expected to work over time. The so-called Total System Performance Assessment is, in the words of one nuclear industry representative, "the mother of all codes."

The glaring omission of such a critical document is yet more evidence of the Energy Department's continued failure and more proof that the Yucca Mountain project should be stopped. Over the past two decades the department has shown itself to be irresponsible, duplicitous and incompetent. How can an agency that cannot even put its paperwork in order be entrusted to oversee the safe shipment of 77,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste cross-country?

It can't. For the good of the country, the judges should deny the department's request, and Congress should do the right thing and kill the project.

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