Editorial: Alaskan keeps on fumbling

Sen. Frank Murkowski is back again, trying to get Congress to adopt his energy strategy for the nation. While the Alaska Republican claims his bill unveiled Tuesday would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil to 50 percent by 2010, the legislation is critically flawed. The bill would allow oil exploration of Alaska's coastal plain, which would pose a serious threat to the environment. In addition, Murkowski wants to promote more nuclear power energy, which would create dangerous, high-level nuclear waste. Murkowski, then, is willing to accomplish his goals by harming the environment in the process, an unacceptable trade-off.

Nevadans have witnessed firsthand Murkowski's brutish efforts, as he has tried for years to ramrod nuclear waste into this state -- despite scientific evidence showing how dangerous burial here would be. His latest legislation also should concern Nevadans, especially because of his insistence that more nuclear power is needed.

Murkowski's bill also assumes that Nevada's Yucca Mountain will in fact become the nation's first nuclear waste repository -- even though the suitability study isn't finished yet. Murkowski adds that if more reactors are built, the additional spent fuel could be sent to Yucca Mountain if it is found safe to handle more waste. (He does acknowledge, though, that a second repository might be needed if Yucca Mountain can't handle the additional spent fuel.)

Along with the dangers posed by burying high-level nuclear waste, the economics have shown that nuclear power is a financial bust: As Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., noted Tuesday, there hasn't been a new commercial nuclear reactor placed in the United States in the last 25 years. Despite Murkowski's window dressing in dubbing this the "National Energy Security Act," this is nothing more than legislation drafted to further the interests of the nuclear power and oil industries, whose bottom-line interests don't necessarily coincide with our national interests, which include protecting the public's safety and the environment.

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