Editorial: A dead horse rides

Sunday, May 27, 2007 | 7:14 a.m.

Two of the nuclear industry's biggest supporters in the U.S. Senate, Republicans Pete Domenici of New Mexico and Larry Craig of Idaho, are trying to revive the foolhardy plan to dump tens of thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste in Nevada.

The senators are up to an old ruse, saying the Nevada Test Site would be a temporary location for the nation's spent nuclear fuel. The Test Site is adjacent to the government's preferred storage location - Yucca Mountain, which is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas - so the idea, of course, would be to ultimately make Nevada the nation's permanent toxic graveyard. To that end, the bill also would repeal the 77,000-ton cap in law placed on how much waste could be buried at Yucca Mountain, nearly doubling the dump's potential capacity.

Nevada has fended off challenges such as this over the past two decades and will need to mount another defense. The evidence is overwhelming that putting the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada would be unsafe, but the power of the nuclear industry's lobby, especially over the Republican Party, has been able to keep this project alive in Congress. This is why it has been important to have Democrats, especially with Nevada Sen. Harry Reid as majority leader, in control of the Senate to block this project.

After spending years and billions of dollars trying to make a scientific case for Yucca Mountain, the Energy Department has failed. It has also failed to support absurd claims that it is perfectly safe to cart tons of nuclear waste across the country on the nation's highways and railroads.

It is time for the senators who are behind this latest attempt to remember the old Western saying: You are beating a dead horse.