Clinton ups the ante on Yucca Mountain

Michael J. Mishak and Lisa Mascaro

Saturday, July 21, 2007 | 7:21 a.m.

After more than a week of watching her Democratic rivals capture local headlines with their Nevada visits, Sen. Hillary Clinton launched a haymaker from 2,500 miles away Friday, seizing ownership of Nevada's signature issue: Yucca Mountain.

In a late afternoon conference call from Washington, a well-prepped Clinton called for congressional hearings on Yucca Mountain, the proposed repository for the nation's nuclear waste about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In particular, she wants the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, on which she serves, to pressure the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to adopt clear radiation standards that would ensure public health and safety. She also called on the Department of Energy to halt the project's application until the EPA takes action.

"There has been a great deal of confusion and stonewalling by the administration to finding appropriate, scientifically based information," Clinton said. "We need to get this information on the record and do everything we can to lay the groundwork to make it clear that we will not proceed with Yucca Mountain."

If elected president, Clinton said , she would "not go forward" with the project. In a past interview with the Sun, Clinton said she would refuse to fund Yucca Mountain.

The issue, more than any other, has become the litmus test for presidential candidates as they campaign in Nevada, now set to vote right after first-in-the-nation Iowa and just before New Hampshire on the 2008 nomination calendar. The entire Democratic field of candidates opposes the Yucca project.

Sen. Chris Dodd's statement last week is typical. Speaking to a small crowd gathered for the opening of his Las Vegas campaign headquarters, Dodd, unprompted, said he was opposed to the project. "I don't think that's a safe repository," he said, adding that dry cask technology - which makes plants' on-site storage of nuclear waste safer - had settled the storage question for the moment.

Clinton's announcement, marked by the strongest language yet of any candidate, was an attempt to position her as the leader on the issue, willing to tackle it on the national stage in congressional hearings.

"They've been unaccountable and haven't had to answer questions until now because the Republican Congress wasn't willing to ask the hard questions," Clinton said of the EPA, which has failed to establish a new standard for radiation exposure after its former rule was thrown out by the federal courts in 2004. "We're going to ask the hard questions and get to the bottom of this process."

From the outset, Clinton's Nevada campaign, chaired by Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid, has sought to define her as the candidate most attuned to the state's concerns.

"I've been saying for months that Hillary Clinton has a more comprehensive understanding of the issues that confront Nevadans than any other presidential candidate," said Reid, the son of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "This is evidence that she's willing to do more than talk about it."

Clinton's efforts to investigate the Yucca Mountain project come as the Energy Department is under tremendous pressure to meet a June 2008 deadline to submit the site's license application for the project to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Democrats and Republicans alike have made clear they will have little tolerance if the department again blows this deadline, as it did years ago.

Yucca Mountain's opening is 20 years behind schedule, and some think any delay at this juncture could doom the project as the pro-nuclear Bush administration comes to an end.

By calling for hearings, Clinton is jumping into a debate that has been under way in Washington and Nevada about why the EPA has been unable to meet a 2006 deadline for releasing new radiation standards - the level of cancer-causing toxins that can be released from the site. The previous standards were thrown out as too weak after a legal challenge by Nevada.

Nevada is poised to again attack the standards if they are not satisfactory. Shedding light on the delay could give opponents greater ammunition to block the Yucca Mountain project.

Robert Loux, director of the state agency fighting Yucca Mountain, said the hearings will put the EPA on the hot seat. "It's important to know what the hold up is, why they haven't released it," he said. "Is this political or are there scientific issues?"

Energy spokesman Allen Benson said the senator's actions will not delay the department's work toward meeting the June deadline. "We have a mission under the law and we're fulfilling that mission," he said.

Clinton's announcement also dovetailed with in-state developments.

On Friday, the state engineer reinstated a cease-and-desist order to stop the Energy Department from using any more ground water for bore hole drilling at Yucca.

State Engineer Tracy Taylor said earlier that he thought the department deliberately violated terms agreed to in 2003 on using ground water from two wells, but had agreed, with Gov. Jim Gibbons' approval, to extend the drilling activity for 30 days.