Mission impossible

Wednesday, June 4, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman got way ahead of himself Tuesday in hailing his department’s filing of an application to open Yucca Mountain.

He said it was “a big day” and boasted that the information contained in the application’s 8600 pages will “stand up to any challenge anywhere.”

But his big day was really not big at all. The application did not include any documents setting forth a public radiation standard, around which debate on the mountain’s safety must revolve.

Yucca Mountain, near the agricultural community of Amargosa Valley 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was chosen by Congress in 1987 to be the nation’s sole burial spot for nuclear waste.

A clue to the extent of the mountain’s unsuitability is that it has taken 21 years for the Energy Department to file, incompletely at that, for a license.

The incomplete application was filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose deliberations are expected to take three or four years.

Innumerable issues raised by Nevada involving the mountain’s safety — none of which has been satisfactorily answered — caused the application process to drag on for all those years.

Critical among the issues is the radiation standard, which sets the amount of cancer-causing radioactivity allowed to be emitted in one year.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s original standard, allegedly protecting people from harmful exposure to radiation for 10,000 years, was thrown out by a federal court. Nuclear waste takes about 3 million years to decay to a level where it is no longer life-threatening.

A new standard, one that would protect people for a million years, was supposed to be included in the application. But the EPA, which said in early 2006 that the final standard would be ready by the end of the year, still hasn’t issued it.

The Energy Department says it will add the new standard to its application later as an amendment. When that happens, it still won’t be a big day. Setting a standard for what amounts to an eternity is, of course, impossible.