Spring break at Yucca

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

As part of his “investigation” into President Barack Obama’s decision to shut down the Yucca Mountain project, Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., led a congressional delegation to Nevada on Tuesday to tour the site.

Shimkus, chairman of a House subcommittee that oversees nuclear waste, said the administration has “illegally closed Yucca Mountain.” He points to a law that pushed the nation toward building a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The administration is trying to withdraw an application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency tasked with determining whether a nuclear waste dump is built there.

The government has spent a quarter of a century trying to prove that Yucca Mountain is a good place to put nuclear waste, but all the site has proven to be is a money pit. After spending more than $13 billion, all the government has is a massive hole in the ground. It would takes billions more to complete the project, and that would be a waste. Yucca Mountain is an unsuitable site and the plans to send waste there are dangerous.

Shimkus is doing the bidding of the nuclear power industry, which wants to turn Nevada into a nuclear waste dump. His complaints about the administration’s actions are laughable. Should Congress really continue to support a failed project, especially in this era of budget cutting? And if he’s concerned about legality, he should know that Congress recently approved a plan that zeroed out funding for Yucca Mountain. After all, he voted for it.

The trip to Yucca Mountain is nothing more than an expensive junket to Las Vegas. Democrats in Congress, including Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., urged Shimkus not to go. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the Energy Department estimated that the tour could cost as much as $200,000 because of the expenses of reopening the tunnel into the mountain, as well as restarting various equipment.

In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Shimkus dismissed the Energy Department’s calculations, saying the cost was overblown. He unbelievably said it wouldn’t even be necessary to go inside the tunnel.

Shimkus and his colleagues scheduled a meeting with officials in Nye County, apparently to address what he said were “significant concerns” about the site’s shutdown. There was, however, no meeting scheduled with opponents of the dump who represent the majority of Nevadans. Shimkus wouldn’t want to “investigate” that, now would he?

Instead, he and others beholden to the nuclear power industry in Congress continue their foolish push to open Yucca Mountain. They say there is no evidence proving that the site isn’t scientifically sound. That’s only true if one listens to the nuclear power industry, which argues that Yucca Mountain is a safe and out-of-the-way place to put 77,000 tons of deadly radioactive waste.

Here’s what Shimkus missed on his tour: Yucca Mountain isn’t really a rock-solid mountain. It’s a porous volcanic ridge in a seismically active area incapable of containing nuclear waste for a prolonged period. And if 90 miles away from Las Vegas is the middle of nowhere, why not put it in some mountain a similar distance from Washington? It would make it easier to haul the waste.

As experts have said for years, it makes more sense to leave the waste on site at nuclear power plants, where it could safely be stored in solid steel-and-concrete containers called dry casks, while the nation figures out a viable long-term plan for nuclear waste.

That would be safer and quicker than having a dump at Yucca Mountain and it would undoubtedly be cheaper. And it would save Shimkus from any further investigation.