Hearings were last gasps of Yucca Mountain road show

Sunday, Sept. 20, 2015 | 2 a.m.

The federal government’s long-winded campaign to mollify the nuclear power industry by adopting Yucca Mountain as the burial grounds for spent, highly radioactive fuel rods is running on fumes. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s hearings last week in Southern Nevada were farcical, the dying gasps of misguided efforts, extended by a judge’s order when just about everyone except nuclear power plant operators is finally willing to put Yucca in the rearview mirror.

The NRC, keeping a straight face, conducted the hearings only because of the court order, to get public feedback on an environmental impact statement that concluded that any radiation leakage from Yucca Mountain, through groundwater, would be inconsequential, based on its computer modeling. (Never mind that Nevada’s experts have found otherwise.)

Thankfully, we don’t expect to be putting the lives of future generations of Nevadans on the line based on a computer’s theoretical projection. The Department of Energy, the applicant that was seeking the use of Yucca Mountain’s bowels, withdrew its request in 2010. The NRC said the matter still had to go forward. The issue was appealed but became essentially moot after President Barack Obama and Sen. Harry Reid stripped the project of ongoing funding.

With that cold slap, the NRC’s review and hearing process was halted in 2011, before one of its panels had even gotten to some 300 contentious issues that remained to be settled in a series of very expensive, court-like adversarial hearings. Two years later, a federal appeals court blew on the dying embers and ordered the NRC to resume its review using existing, unspent funds from previous years. So with money it found in desk drawers and between the couch cushions, the NRC produced a five-volume safety evaluation.

This was an absurd exercise, ordering the federal government to spend project money until it’s gone so the NRC apparently could then clear the books and wash its hands of Yucca Mountain. Just as well, because if the process were to be revived — perhaps by a new Congress and a president unfriendly to Nevada and adding to the tens of billions of dollars already spent on this — there are still huge, unresolved issues. Among them: the Department of Energy had not even acquired the land and water rights necessary for construction and operation of the repository, nor has it been approved to receive and possess high-level nuclear waste. And getting nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain would be more expensive and challenging than ever now that Obama, with Reid as the primary cheerleader, in July created the Basin and Range National Monument. That designation not only preserves 700,000 acres of mountains and desert valleys and 4,000-year-old rock art, it thwarts efforts to ship spent fuel rods through the region, which had been identified as the most effective route between Caliente and Yucca Mountain.

With all this said, let’s keep in mind there are other proposals from private companies to store highly radioactive nuclear waste on a temporary basis — 60 years, versus a million, until new long-term solutions can be found. As Gov. Brian Sandoval said of the futility of continued NRC hearings, “Moving beyond the failed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is essential if our country is ever going to safely solve the problem of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.”

One point is clear during this exhausting battle to protect Yucca Mountain: There’s growing political agreement and the recommendation of a presidential commission that no state should have these spent fuel rods shoved down its throat — especially Nevada, which doesn’t have any nuclear power plants yet is being asked to accommodate everyone else’s radioactive castoffs like it should be our problem, not theirs.

Let’s remember how we got into this mess. The ball got rolling in 1982 — a third of a century ago — when Congress directed the Department of Energy to find a place with the right kind of geology to make it safe enough to store fuel rods that had completed their mission in generating power but were still among the most lethal material on the planet. Five years later, with other sites being considered, Congress voted to just shove the waste on Nevada. It became known as the “Screw Nevada bill.” Nevada seemed like a patsy, a state that already had withstood years of atmospheric and below-ground atomic bomb testing.

So the political hooligans in Washington took advantage of us, and we were too young, too weak, too naïve to fight them off. But Nevada matured politically, with governor after governor, and Sens. Richard Bryan and then Reid, standing up to protect our future. There was far too much at stake, for our tourism-driven economy and the lives of generations not yet born, to yield to states that were bullying us. So Nevada buffed up, and we’re on the brink of finally putting this threat to rest.

It really doesn’t matter what this final environmental impact statement concluded; it was merely a stage prop in a meaningless traveling road show. It’s unimaginable that any Congress would authorize still more money and waste even more years pursuing a mountain that is geologically deficient for such a role, for which the government doesn’t have sufficient land and water rights to exploit, and which is no longer easily accessible because the prime route has been shut down.

So NRC, keep the appellate court happy and spend the remaining money as quickly as possible, then pack up, turn the lights off, move on and find a site that works.