McCain supports developing the technologies needed to reprocess and transmute nuclear wastes. This greatly reduces the quantity, and longevity, of the residual nuclear wastes. These still need a repository (like Yucca Mountain), but the amounts are reduced so much that it could become logical to send them to an international repository too. The most important point in McCain's speech, which is being ignored to focus narrowly on the Yucca Mountain part, was to support an international repository for wastes from countries with small nuclear programs where we do not want them starting up enrichment and reprocessing. This is a really good idea, and of course this editorial ignores the issue of whether expanding use of nuclear energy might cause proliferation of nuclear weapons, and if so the fact that an international repository could greatly reduce these risks.

Ron Bourgoin asserts that the DOE license application for Yucca Mountain is fundamentally flawed. This would be a surprise, since the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, in its independent reviews, has found no fundamental problems that would keep the Yucca Mountain site from meeting the one-million year safety standard that the Environmental Protection Agency requires.

The important point is that once the application is sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they will perform an independent technical and scientific assessment. The NRC has been performing its own studies, including work by the Southwest Research Institute, and the NRC's conclusion on whether or not to grant a construction license will provide the strongest and most credible conclusion to the questions about Yucca Mountain's suitability.

In the mean time, while NRC's review is underway, Nevadan's should remember that Yucca Mountain is the only case where the EPA has ever required a million-year safety standard. There are plenty of hazardous chemical that remain dangerous permanently, which the EPA does not regulate for any more from a few hundred years to at most 10,000 years.

Nevada's gold mining industry, for example, has already created 40 deep open pit mines that will create highly toxic lakes as the evaporation of ground water concentrates heavy metals from the nearby ore bodies in these permanent lakes, over thousands of years.

This is not to say that Yucca Mountain should not be required to demonstrate compliance with a million-year safety standard, but instead to say that this is pretty safe, and if the NRC decides that the technology and science warrant issuing a construction license, there are more important things to work to fix than Yucca Mountain.