Editorial: Slighted by sleight of hand

If Las Vegas Strip resorts ever ran out of magicians for their floor shows, we could recommend two acts they ought to hire. One is Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska. The other is the federal Department of Energy.

Murkowski, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, makes David Copperfield look like a rank amateur. The Alaska senator would like nothing more than to see the nation's high-level nuclear waste dumped at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Repeatedly he has reached into his bag of tricks to try to make this happen, only to fail to craft a bill worthy enough to become law.

Now Murkowski is at it again with yet another bill. Murkowski thinks he can appease his critics by permitting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set the air and water quality standards for a Yucca Mountain repository. That is a reversal from his earlier position that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission set the standards. But the senator is still using sleight of hand.

Nevada Democratic Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan are expected to argue, and we concur, that the decision to consider only Yucca Mountain as the repository is based on politics rather than science. The bill will not remove the fact that tens of millions of Americans live along the routes where this deadly radioactive waste would be transported. Congress also must take note that a repository will cost American taxpayers billions of dollars because there is not enough money in the Nuclear Waste Fund to build an adequate facility, according to a financial review sponsored by the DOE.

Not to be outdone is the DOE, which is proposing a stunt that would make Harry Houdini proud. The Sun's Mary Manning reported that instead of using possible disqualifying factors such as earthquakes or contaminated ground water to eliminate Yucca Mountain from consideration, the DOE would simply use a computer model with a range of scenarios. The idea is that scientists could study how the mountain would perform over the next 10,000 years.

The DOE cannot be serious. We think veteran nuclear waste consultant Atef Elzeftany has a point when he says he had never seen a computer model that is accurate. Even the Nuclear Energy Institute, which wants the federal government to do something about nuclear waste, complained that the DOE's proposal is too inflexible and should be rejected.

If Murkowski and the DOE want to perform magic, we propose they do so on the Strip. Otherwise, we suggest they leave Nevada alone and take their acts elsewhere.

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