Waste dump opponents sense victory

By Joe Schoenmann

Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Despite the eleventh hour push by the Bush administration to advance efforts to make Yucca Mountain the dump for all of the nation’s highly radioactive nuclear waste, that plan is on its last legs, Nevada’s anti-Yucca forces said this week.

“I believe we’re on the threshold of victory,” Richard Bryan, the former U.S. senator and former governor of Nevada, said at Monday’s meeting of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Commission. Bryan is commission chairman.

One reason for his belief: At the end of this week, the state will release its barrage of reasons why Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, should remain free of nuclear waste.

State Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto on Friday is to release the list of hundreds of contentions that will be filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“These are serious challenges that will demonstrate convincingly the flaws in the Department of Energy’s program,” said Bob Loux, longtime chief of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency. “When others outside Nevada see the seriousness of these charges, they will come to the realization that Yucca Mountain can never be licensed.”

The list notes, for example, that the state has demonstrated that the canisters that are to be filled with nuclear waste are vulnerable to corrosion from water and “have no chance of lasting more than a few hundred years.”

The Department of Energy will have 50 days to analyze and respond to the list of contentions; then Nevada has two weeks to respond to that analysis. That’s when the real debate begins.

Loux expects that an administrative law judge’s review of all of this could take up to 12 years.

“It’s a very lengthy process,” he said.

And that’s only if the new president fails to meet Nevada’s expectations.

Loux also told the commission that he has talked with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition people, and everything he “heard indicates (Obama) will keep his word on Yucca Mountain.”

“We have a new president, we have the majority leader. Obama carried Nevada, and he pledged he was going to stop it,” Loux said.

During the campaign, Obama aired a television ad that said: “Barack Obama. Opposes Opening Yucca. He’ll protect our families.”

Another encouraging sign came this month when the Surface Transportation Board, a three-member appointed panel that oversees railroad construction projects, came to Las Vegas to consider whether to allow the Energy Department to build a railroad from Caliente in Eastern Nevada to Yucca Mountain.

And although the hearing was largely regarded as a formality by opponents of the Yucca Mountain dump plan, local officials expressed surprise at the thoughtful, pointed questions the board asked.

Suddenly the hearing seemed like yet another facet of the Yucca debate that might go Nevada’s way.

So, one way or another, Loux said after Monday’s meeting, the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump appears “on its way out and down.”

Sun reporter Phoebe Sweet contributed to this article.