Ending Yucca Mountain

Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011 | 2:05 a.m.

President Barack Obama’s administration is renewing its strong and welcome push to end Yucca Mountain, the planned nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The president’s budget proposal, released Monday, would eliminate funding for the project completely.

On Friday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sent a letter to a blue-ribbon panel studying nuclear waste policy and declared that the Yucca Mountain plan is not a “workable option.” He said the project had “produced years of continued acrimony, dispute, and uncertainty,” adding that the nation should move forward to find a better way to handle nuclear waste.

Chu is correct. The plan to put the nation’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is not workable. Carting 77,000 tons of deadly radioactive waste across the country to store in a porous volcanic ridge simply doesn’t make sense, either logically or scientifically. But the push to make Nevada a nuclear waste dump is grounded in politics. Other states want the radioactive material out of their backyards, and although there were much better sites across the country, Congress chose Nevada in 1987 because the state didn’t have the political clout in Washington to stop it.

Over the years, the government has tried to demonstrate that the proposal makes sense and is safe, but it hasn’t been able to do so. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Republican George W. Bush promised Nevadans that he would make a decision on “sound science,” but after he took office he disregarded that pledge. Even though the site didn’t measure up to standard, Bush in 2002 designated it as the nation’s nuclear waste dump, over the objection of state leaders.

Even though the work designed to support the site was far from done, the Energy Department applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build the nuclear waste dump. When Obama took office, the administration started to take steps to shut the project down, but that has been caught up in legal and political fights. Several states that have nuclear waste are suing to continue the Yucca Mountain project, and nuclear supporters have continued to press Congress on the issue.

The Republican leadership of the House Appropriations Committee released its budget plan Friday, and as Karoun Demirjian reported on the Las Vegas Sun’s website, it would continue to keep Yucca Mountain going. Some political observers noted that Republicans appear to be picking a fight with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has led the state’s congressional delegation for years in the effort to end Yucca Mountain. And they’ll run into a tough fight.

“Let me be clear,” Reid said Friday, “any attempt to restart the Yucca Mountain project will not happen on my watch as Senate majority leader.

“If House Republicans are genuinely interested in fiscal responsibility, they should stop trying to waste more taxpayer money on an irretrievably bad project.”

With all of their talk about the budget, Republicans should look at the bottom line. The federal government has spent more than two decades working on Yucca Mountain and has spent billions of dollars, but it has little to show for it other than a hole in the ground. To continue spending money on it is foolish. It’s time to end Yucca Mountain once and for all.