Editorial: Nuke waste bill has no chance of passage

With Congress expected to adjourn sometime this month there is precious little time to waste on proposed legislation that has no chance this year of becoming law.

Such is the case with a bill that would allow the nation's high-level nuclear waste to be dumped as early as 2007 at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. President Clinton, who has repeatedly backed Nevada in its fight against nuclear waste, has vowed to veto the bill sponsored by Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska.

Despite the veto threat, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., has said he plans to call a vote on the legislation. But because Murkowski and his cronies in the nuclear power industry have failed to prove they have the 67 votes needed to override a veto, a vote on the bill would be a waste of time.

We share the president's objection to a provision in the bill that would allow the environmental standards for a Yucca Mountain repository to be set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rather than the more stringent Environmental Protection Agency. Even Murkowski conceded that if the EPA were allowed to set the standards for ground water, the repository would be killed.

That's because the EPA has proposed a limit of 4 millirems -- about half a chest X-ray of radiation -- to escape the mountain through the ground water, at least six times less than the standard the NRC would set. With the Department of Energy conceding that no repository can be leak-proof, Alaska's junior senator has a right to fear the EPA.

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