Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

SUN EDITORIAL:

Yucca Mountain low

Assemblyman sees a future for the dump — one that would be dangerous

Since President Barack Obama said he was withdrawing the Energy Department’s application to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, many Republicans have tried to keep the program alive. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a former GOP presidential candidate, has been livid and called Obama’s move “an insult to the intelligence.”

That was a shot at not just Obama but also at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who has fought the dump for years and worked with Obama to end the project. Realizing that the momentum is against them, McCain and others have tried to keep a Yucca repository alive any way they can. The most recent idea is to champion the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and they say Yucca Mountain would be a great place to do that.

Typically, such disingenuous approaches have failed in Nevada. Over the years there has been strong bipartisan support in the state against the dump. There are exceptions of course, particularly a small segment in Northern Nevada that doesn’t think it would be affected by having a nuclear waste dump near Las Vegas. Take, for example, Assemblyman Ty Cobb, a Republican from Washoe County, who raised the issue of Yucca Mountain on Thursday with the online Nevada News Bureau.

“Right now, it would be best to change the project from the old version, which was just a waste dump, to a reprocessing center,” he said. “It would be interim storage, and we could reprocess the waste and reuse it.” He said it would be good for the economy because it would create jobs.

Please. Cobb is recycling arguments for Yucca Mountain that were used by a handful of the Nevada supporters of the dump who wanted the state to negotiate benefits for dropping its opposition to the project. Those who wanted the blood money ignored myriad fatal flaws pertaining to the Yucca Mountain plan.

The reality is that a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain is a danger to Nevada and the nation. That danger would be increased if the site were to be converted into a nuclear reprocessing center.

One of the first problems the project faced was getting the waste to Nevada. The federal government planned to send more than 77,000 tons of deadly radioactive waste across country on trucks and rail cars, putting millions of Americans in danger of an accident on the nation’s transportation routes.

Reprocessing the waste would increase the chance of an accident because the waste would be shipped to Yucca Mountain and then sent back in the form of reprocessed fuel.

There is also the issue of storage, which was always the Achilles’ heel at Yucca Mountain because the site simply wasn’t suitable. Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel increases the amount of waste, which would cause more storage problems. Then there is the danger involved in working with the spent fuel to reprocess it.

There is no rush to move the spent nuclear fuel from power plants. Experts say the way the spent fuel is stored will be good for hundreds of years.

The National Republican Party, which is tied at the hip to the nuclear power industry, has been pushing a Yucca repository for years with disingenuous arguments about the project providing jobs.

If Cobb were really concerned about jobs in Southern Nevada, he should quit toeing the national GOP’s line and work on improving education or bringing renewable energy projects to the state. Cobb’s advocacy is wrong. The project would put Nevadans needlessly at risk, and most of the state’s Republican leaders know that. Let a Yucca Mountain waste dump die once and for all.

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