Editorial: A new tone in Congress

Sunday, Nov. 4, 2007 | 1:45 a.m.

One of the Bush administration's top energy goals has been to get Yucca Mountain opened as the burial site for the nation's nuclear waste. Shoving safety concerns expressed by Democrats aside and coddling the pseudoscience of government agencies were among its strategies for achieving that goal.

A hearing on Yucca Mountain last week before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was the first since Democrats gained control of Congress, and it truly showed what a difference an election can make.

Even Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., gave Democrats credit for the way they handled the hearing. "It was a different tone," he told the Sun's Washington reporter, Lisa Mascaro. "The fact that the Democrats held this hearing is a very positive move in trying to get alternatives (to a Yucca repository) on the table."

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., a candidate for president, had called in July for the hearing. She expressed impatience at the Bush administration's stonewalling on the release of scientific information on safety at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Determining how much radiation from Yucca can leak into the environment without creating a health hazard is the role of the Environmental Protection Agency. A federal court in 2004 rejected the EPA's initial radiation standard. A revision released in 2005 was denounced at public hearings and placed back under review.

Now, two years later, and with the project's scheduled licence application just eight months away, the agency still has not issued an updated radiation standard.

Clinton's direct, no-nonsense questioning at the hearing of an EPA representative got to the heart of the matter. After 20 years of work, the EPA still cannot say when its scientific analysis of Yucca Mountain's effect on human health will be ready.

The admission adds credence to Nevada's point that a "safe" radiation standard for Yucca Mountain is an impossibility. We are encouraged that all the Democratic presidential candidates are on record as opposing a repository at Yucca Mountain, and that a new tone on this issue is being heard in Congress.