Editorial: Why not just burn it?

Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2007 | 7:08 a.m.

If President Bush were serious about cutting wasteful government programs, he would not have included nearly $495 million for Yucca Mountain in his new budget.

There is only one encouraging fact about his budget request for this unsafe plan to bury high-level nuclear waste under the mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas - it is a lower amount than he asked for last year.

For his fiscal year 2007 budget, he asked for $544 million. Congress cut that amount to $446 million, an amount, in our view, that was $446 million too much. For the years 2006, 2005 and 2004, Congress approved a total of $1.6 billion. And before that, counting construction and research costs, more than $4 billion was spent.

Twenty years ago Nevada, through its own research, proved that Yucca Mountain was geologically unsafe. And in succeeding years, the state used statistics to demonstrate that hauling the deadly waste to Yucca Mountain from all over the country for 25 years would almost certainly result in horrendous rail and trucking accidents.

An inability to prove the project's safety has prevented the Energy Department from even applying for a license to open Yucca Mountain. In the 1980s the goal was to have the project licensed and operational by 1998. Last week, in an article in Congressional Quarterly, Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell estimated 2020 as the opening date.

This is folly. A few years ago the date was estimated at 2010. Then it became 2012. Then 2017. Now it's 2020. The pattern is obvious: This project cannot be proven safe, and no amount of millions in any president's budget is going to change that.

We have supported legislation such as the Spent Nuclear Fuel On-Site Storage Act, introduced in 2005 by the combined congressional delegations of Nevada and Utah, which would require commercial nuclear utilities to transfer their waste from water-filled pools to on-site dry storage casks.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved designs for the casks and says they are capable of storing the waste safely for 100 years. This would provide time to research nuclear waste disposal and find a much safer solution than Yucca Mountain.

The money being wasted every year on Yucca Mountain could finance some of that research.