Editorial: Yucca has earned its fiscal black eye

Even non-Nevadans have long observed that the drive to find a home for the nation's high-level nuclear waste has been skewed, targeting this state unfairly when plenty of scientific evidence suggests that placing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain would be an environmental disaster.

Recently two of the voices challenging the Department of Energy's work at Yucca Mountain issued reports again critical of that agency's investigation. The General Accounting Office focused on the overall financial mismanagement at the department. Meanwhile, a coalition headed by the National Taxpayers Union and environmental groups released its annual Green Scissors report, which once again cited work at Yucca Mountain as being environmentally unsafe and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

In the GAO report, the watchdog for Congress noted that $6.5 billion and 15 years later, the Yucca Mountain project is actually 12 years behind schedule. One irony in this mess is that while Congress keeps throwing good money after bad, it cut off funding for the state's oversight of Yucca Mountain in 1996. Hopefully Congress will give the state a break and endorse Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson's proposal to give Nevada $4.7 million for this work; while not leveling the playing field, at least this infusion of money gives the state an opportunity to investigate the work at Yucca Mountain.

Congress has turned a deaf ear to valid criticism that Yucca Mountain is unsuitable scientifically. Hopefully these two reports will at least give some members of Congress reason to pause and consider the monumental waste of money expended on this fiscal black hole.

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