Las Vegas Sun

"Congress succumbed to his recommendation, despite Bush's campaign promise to Nevadans that he would hold off on any Yucca decision until the project had been 'deemed scientifically safe.' No such determination has ever been made."

Fortunately, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will perform an independent scientific and technical review of the Yucca Mountain license application. The NRC will also hold hearings to consider input from independent technical and scientific assessments, including those by the State of Nevada. There are a lot of claims, one way and another, about whether Yucca Mountain would be safe. Let's see what the USNRC ends up saying.

There is a lot of rhetoric about whether or not Yucca Mountain is safe. The purpose of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission scientific review of the DOE license application is to provide an independent assessment of this question, specifically, to determine whether Yucca Mountain can meet a one-million year safety standard that is vastly more stringent than anything the U.S. requires for the disposal of chemicals.

The reason that the scientific community and Congress will not support withdrawing the license application is that this would allow politics to trump science--and those who advocate withdrawing the application should think about what this implies about the strength of their argument.

The largest problem with Yucca Mountain is not its ability to meet a million-year safety standard, but instead is with our policy for how to use Yucca Mountain. The best approach is for Congress to amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to recognize that the best long-term solution for spent fuel is reprocessing, and that Yucca Mountain is really only needed for much smaller amounts of U.S. defense wastes and for residual wastes from reprocessing.

Congress needs to act, not to derail the current NRC review process, but instead to change our policy for how to use Yucca Mountain.

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.