Editorial: Yucca becoming irrelevant

Thursday, Sept. 27, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.

Owners of the South Texas Project, a nuclear power plant southwest of Houston, are planning a $5.2 billion expansion - and "Whether Yucca Mountain happens or not plays no part in our calculation," an executive says.

Their announcement at a news conference on Tuesday in Washington signals the start of a new strategy for justifying the building of more nuclear power plants.

Part of the reason - aside from safety and cost - that nuclear power plants have not been proposed in decades was that Yucca Mountain is years from opening.

In the past 25 years the federal government has spent $8 billion preparing the mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the site for burying the plants' deadly nuclear waste.

Nevada has spent that time documenting the ways in which the burial plan would pose grave risks. The state thinks, as we do, that the waste should continue to be stored at existing nuclear power plants until a solution far safer than burial is developed.

Stubbornly, the federal government and the nuclear industry have clung to the Yucca Mountain plan - largely to justify building more nuclear power plants.

But two facts are now becoming clear: The Nevada congressional delegation, particularly Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has been effective in blocking a Yucca repository, and there is no guarantee the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would license it, given the safety issues.

David Crane is president of Princeton, N.J.-based NRG Energy, one of the owners of the South Texas Project. He said Tuesday that there's plenty of room at the company's 12,200-acre site in Bay City, Texas, to store all the plant's waste from its existing reactor and the two it plans to build.

So after years of the nuclear power industry being opposed to on-site storage, it is suddenly OK in Texas. We think on-site storage is the only option for existing nuclear power plants, because the waste purportedly will be safe there for about 100 years.

But no more plants should be built until there is a true long-term solution to the waste, which in its present form, will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.