Editorial: Bye, bye Johnny

Sunday, June 24, 2007 | 7:09 a.m.

Last week the Energy Department announced general design requirements for canisters to carry high-level nuclear waste to Nevada for burial in the proposed, but not yet approved, Yucca Mountain repository - just one day before the House voted to kill the project's cartoon mascot.

A story by the Associated Press on Tuesday says the transportation, aging and disposal canisters - or TADS - are to be 15 1/2 to 17 1/2 feet long and weigh no more than 54 1/4 tons each. About 7,500 of the canisters would be needed to store the 77,000 tons of nuclear waste that the federal government wants to ship by rail to Nevada.

Yucca Mountain was originally set to open in 1998, but the federal government's failure to heed scientific evidence that such storage would be unsafe is one of the reasons that has prevented the Energy Department from acquiring a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to open it. The agency intends to apply for the license next year, and the soonest it could open - if at all - is 2017.

Energy Department officials told AP that they intend to go forward with the license application even if final designs for the TADS canisters aren't ready.

We wonder how federal regulators can seriously consider the application if the Energy Department cannot show exactly how the canisters will work.

And it seems agency officials will have to do their explaining without their ill-conceived "Yucca Johnny" campaign. The House cut Yucca Johnny's funding Wednesday.

It's about time Johnny took a hike. For more than a year, the Energy Department has used the cartoon character on its Youth Zone Web site to tell children why it's OK - good, even - that the federal government wants to bury 77,000 tons of nuclear poison in Nevada.

Of course, burying Yucca Johnny only takes care of one of the characters in this farce.

President Bush, fulfilling his role as "Yucca Georgie," visited an Alabama nuclear power plant on Thursday and said that the United States needs to increase its use of nuclear power and build three plants a year starting in 2015 - even though more than 50,000 tons of nuclear waste already has piled up around the country, and the government has made no serious plans for storing it. The Yucca Mountain proposal, like its departed cartoon mascot, is little more than fiction and propaganda.