NYT Editorial: Roadblock at Yucca Mountain

[John Jacobus <crispy_bird@YAHOO.COM>]

Editoral for today's New York Times.  You know, that

liberal, leftist newpaper.



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Roadblock at Yucca Mountain



August 23, 2004

 

A federal appeals court decision has thrown a gigantic

roadblock in the way of efforts to create an

underground burial site for nuclear wastes at Yucca

Mountain in Nevada. A three-judge panel in the

District of Columbia ruled last month that regulators

could not simply require the repository to contain the

wastes for 10,000 years, the standard set by the

Environmental Protection Agency, but must instead

ensure that Yucca could function acceptably for

hundreds of thousands of years. That standard is so

outlandishly stringent it may not be achievable.

Unless Congress steps in to change the ground rules,

the court ruling could significantly delay or even

derail efforts to move ahead with an underground

repository that will be vitally needed in coming

decades. 



There seems little doubt that the safest way to

dispose of used fuel rods from nuclear power plants

and highly radioactive wastes from nuclear weapons

production is to bury them deep underground in stable

geological formations resistant to leaking. Experts in

this country and abroad, as well as many 

environmentalists, agree on that point. Although Yucca

Mountain was partly chosen because of a perception

that Nevada lacked the political clout to reject it,

the site has a lot to recommend it. It sits on federal

land where nuclear bombs were tested, in an arid

desert where population density is low, well above the

water table and atop volcanic rocks that have been

there for 12 million to 13 million years. But

technical obstacles, litigation, political opposition

in Nevada and the sheer difficulty of the undertaking

have slowed progress for 17 years and threaten to

prolong the agony indefinitely. 



The Bush administration, to its credit, has tried to

push Yucca toward a resolution. The Energy Department

plans to submit an application to the Nuclear

Regulatory Commission late this year for a license to

build the repository, which would open in 2010 at the

very earliest. The commission must then determine

whether the proposed repository can meet health and

safety standards established by the E.P.A.

Unfortunately, those standards have now been thrown

out by the courts. 



This turn of events can largely be blamed on Congress,

which in a 1992 law told the E.P.A. to set standards

for Yucca Mountain "based upon and consistent with"

the

recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences,

an unusual delegation of authority to a

nongovernmental agency. An academy panel concluded

that there was no rationale for protecting the public

for only 10,000 years given that the peak risk of

radiation might be hundreds of thousands of years in

the future. 



The appeals court ruling that the E.P.A. improperly

ignored the academy could make it virtually impossible

to approve a burial site at Yucca or perhaps anywhere

else in the country. To get out of this mess, Congress

needs to change the law and allow the E.P.A. to set

the compliance period at 10,000 years, roughly twice

as long as recorded human history. That is the period

used by the E.P.A. for a separate military nuclear

repository and the time frame used by other countries

with geological disposal programs. Congress will no

doubt be reluctant to tackle the issue in an election

year, especially since Senator John Kerry and other

Democratic leaders, pandering shamelessly for the

electoral votes of the battleground state of Nevada,

have pledged to block Yucca. 



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/opinion/23mon1.html?ex=1094295155&ei=1&en=2fd3edcd7d5bb071





Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company





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"Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects."

Will Rogers



-- John

John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

e-mail:  crispy_bird@yahoo.com





		

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