Editorial: Nuke dump follies can't seem to end

This view certainly is troubling, especially since seven earthquakes registering above 3.0 on the Richter scale hit Yucca Mountain in the last week of Janurary. The recent earthquakes aren't just an anomaly. In the past two decades, Yucca Mountain has felt 621 earthquakes above 3.0. So this is a real issue that the Energy Department should be taking seriously.

But only bureaucrats with blinders could arrive at the decision the Department of Energy has reached. As the Sun's Mary Manning reports on page one of the Sun section today, the recent earthquakes at Yucca Mountain aren't cause for concern for Energy Department scientists -- they are simply just one part of the agency's master plan as it investigates whether Nevada is suitable for a nuclear waste dump.

"Earthquake shaking we can experience, we will experience," Jerry King, an Energy Department scientist working on the project, told Manning. "We believe it is a design issue rather than a suitability issue." That's right, don't worry, it's just a "design" issue.

Unfortunately for Nevadans almost every element of the Energy Department's investigation has become a "design" issue. Accordingly, using the agency's line of thinking, there is almost nothing that could possibly preclude anything from going wrong. Sometimes it makes you wonder if these are the same scientists who engineered the computers without taking into account that pesky year 2000 problem.

Instead of focusing on the real-world problems of storing for thousands of years the world's deadliest waste, these scientists prefer to confront this as an academic problem, one that can be solved if only the right engineering can be found. And since so much money has been spent on finding ways to make Yucca Mountain suitable, the Energy Department appears desperate to justify all the money that has been expended on its investigation. It's almost as if the agency has been given a square peg and a round hole, and instead of acknowledging it doesn't fit, it has taken a knife and carved out the hole so the peg will fit.

While the Energy Department continues its suitability assessment, Congress is not wasting any time in trying to bring a dump to Nevada. This week a House subcommittee will hear legislation that would permit high-level nuclear waste to be shipped to a so-called "temporary dump" at the Nevada Test Site. It will be interesting to see if Congress, which has been trying to force a nuclear dump on Nevada for more than a decade now, continues its "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" mantra that the Energy Department now mimics so well.

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