Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005 | 7:36 a.m.
For years I waffled on whether to support the government's campaign to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
But after sitting in on an Environmental Protection Agency hearing this week up in Amargosa Valley, I'm now a real cynic. The only optimistic news to come out of the hearing is the government's technical assumption that, a million years from now, there will be something around here to protect.
I was struck that the EPA has proposed holding its cousins at the Energy Department to two different levels of safety when it comes to tolerating radiation leakage.
For the short term (meaning, for the first 10,000 years), the EPA doesn't want more than 15 millirems of radiation to be released, on average, any given year. That's about the same as a chest X-ray.
The EPA came up with that standard a few years ago. It is unclear to me what the EPA will do if the Energy Department fails us. Take away the keys to Yucca Mountain? Throw more sand over it? Rush over to Home Depot and buy better caulking?
But because the worst leakage isn't expected to occur for 200,000 or 300,000 years, give or take, a judge ordered the EPA to set some safety standards for the folks living here at that time.
The EPA proposal would allow up to 350 millirems of radiation to be accidentally released annually, during the time span of 10,000 years to 1 million years from now.
In other words, it is relaxing its safety standards. This won't personally affect me. I'll be dead. But if we're going to assume there will be future generations -- and we have to make that assumption, don't we? -- then to tell them they don't deserve the same level of safety as we deserve, creates a troublesome ethics problem. We should squirm in our pews.
I'm not a rocket surgeon, but it looks suspiciously that the EPA is loosening its safety standards to accommodate the expected increase in radiation leakage. Not so, according to the EPA folks.
"We are accepting a greater level of risk over the long time period," said Elizabeth Cotsworth, director of the EPA's office of radiation and indoor air. "But we believe both (standards) are protective."
Maybe. But remember that the levees in New Orleans were supposed to hold up better against hurricanes. The Army Corps of Engineers will be reviewing its previous assumptions about levee construction and the Louisiana geology, and I wonder what that says about government work.
The EPA people never explained to my satisfaction why it is loosening its safety standards over time. It's an unprecedented policy decision, as far as I can tell. If you attend the EPA's hearings today and Thursday in Las Vegas, maybe you'll be more successful in wringing an answer out of them.
The EPA says it came up with the 350-millirem standard this way: Nevadans already are exposed to about 350 millirems of natural background radiation a year -- and Colorado residents are exposed to about 700 millirems.
The EPA logic says that if Yucca Mountain leaks about 350 millirems a year, we'd still be no worse off than our brethren in Colorado.
Here's my suggestion. Coloradans obviously have acclimated to radiation, and there must be an available mountain somewhere in the Rockies. Let's store the used fuel rods there. It'll save transportation costs, too, what with the price of gasoline, since Colorado is closer to most of the nuclear waste producers.
What do we do, then, with Yucca Mountain?
The feds so far have spent about $8 billion on it. That's probably the cost of Steve Wynn's next casino. The government should sell the place before it drops any more into the money pit.
Maybe Donald Trump or his ex-wife could develop it as a subterranean condomonium complex, to mitigate the high rises going up along the Strip.
Or, given suburban sprawl, Station Casinos could begin working on its next themed casino, Yucca Station.
Because the place would always be dark and cool, it would be the perfect wine cellar for the sommeliers from Mandalay Bay.
And I'm sure the folks at Drai's could turn it into the ultimate nightclub. If it were up to me, I'd call it Glow in the Dark.
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