Father of the dump

Sunday, May 25, 2008 | 2:09 a.m.

Within a few weeks the Energy Department is expected to file its application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a high-level nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

But approval is anything but a slam dunk — far from it. The Yucca Mountain project has been riddled by cost overruns, legal setbacks and doubts about its safety. A single nuclear waste dump clearly would create dangers, in both transporting the lethal waste and in its permanent storage in Nevada.

With the looming application for a license serving as a backdrop, it was interesting to read in the Las Vegas Sun on Wednesday what J. Bennett Johnston had to say about Yucca Mountain. Johnston, as a U.S. senator from Louisiana, was the driving force behind the federal government’s decision in 1987 to single out Nevada’s Yucca Mountain to be the nation’s sole dump for 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste.

In Lisa Mascaro’s story, Johnston said the Yucca Mountain project never should have been billed as a facility that could hold nuclear waste indefinitely. Indeed, Johnston believes the repository could have received more support in this state if it had been designed as a temporary facility.

Furthermore, Johnston, speaking before a group of nuclear waste haulers meeting in Washington, D.C., said, “I knew we’d run into the kind of problems that we have — where you can’t absolutely prove with certainty what’s going to happen in 10,000 or 100,000 years.”

He later told Mascaro in an interview: “The opportunity to bring lawsuits and spread uncertainty about what happens ... years from now is too great. And that is exactly what happened.”

A number of things were revealing about Johnston’s comments. With respect to Johnston’s lament that “you can’t absolutely prove with certainty what’s going to happen in 10,000 or 100,000 years,” does he forget that we are talking about nuclear waste? Of course the bar should be set high for the federal government to get approval to bury man’s deadliest waste just 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. There shouldn’t be shortcuts, period.

Does this nation really want a slipshod dump and transportation system to be developed for the disposal of high-level nuclear waste? This isn’t just a Nevada issue. There are tens of millions of people, in small towns and big cities, who live along back roads, major highways and rail tracks over which nuclear waste would be transported across the nation to Nevada. We don’t think they see the tough legal requirements protecting the public health and safety as inconveniences.

Another point made by Johnston — and one shared by the nuclear power industry — was his notion that it just might be time for the federal government to consider building temporary nuclear waste storage sites. Yucca Mountain is years behind schedule — the dump originally was slated to receive waste in 1998, but the Energy Department is now shooting for 2020 — and it’s very likely it won’t open at all.

Johnston can assert that public opposition wouldn’t have been as intense — and that more support could have been built for nuclear waste storage — if a site had been dubbed “temporary.” But, come on, we’re not naive. A temporary storage site would in short order become a permanent dump — and that is why Nevadans aren’t about to accept a “temporary” site.

It is amazing just how far Nevada has come in its fight against the Yucca Mountain project. After the appropriately dubbed “Screw Nevada” bill was passed in 1987, the conventional wisdom was that Nevada didn’t stand a chance against the federal government. And in the early 1990s attempts were made to get Nevada to back off from its opposition and accept the dump in return for federal dollars. But people throughout the state weren’t about to concede the fight. Nevada wasn’t about to be bullied by Johnston and the influential nuclear power industry.

Although the industry thought it would undergo a “Renaissance” during the past decade — particularly with its best friend, George W. Bush, in the White House — it still is struggling. For example, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the latest generation of nuclear power plants — which were supposed to be efficient, less costly and the wave of the future — is creating sticker shock. The latest projected costs for a new plant range from $5 billion to $12 billion, two to four times higher than originally estimated. So much for the “Renaissance.”

The nuclear power industry isn’t the potent political force it once was, and it certainly helps that its former champion in Congress — Johnston — has long since retired from the Senate. But Nevadans shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security.

The reality is that the Energy Department, at the White House’s behest, is recklessly speeding ahead with its Yucca Mountain license application in the waning months of the Bush presidency. Nevadans should see it for what it is: George Bush’s sick parting gift to Nevada.