Yucca Mountain: No.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week whether to override Nevada's veto of a plan to create a permanent nuclear waste disposal site on a desert preserve 90 miles north of Las Vegas. The Yucca Mountain site is the only one available, and something needs to be done about the waste piling up at the nation's 131 nuclear power plants and other installations.

Yet if ever there was a job that needs to be done right, nuclear waste disposal is it. The Senate should reject the Yucca Mountain plan and begin the hard job of coming up with a better disposal program.

The debate over Yucca Mountain has been badly contaminated by the politics of nuclear power. Opponents understand that if Yucca Mountain is approved, they'll lose one of their most persuasive arguments against the expansion, or even the continuation, of nuclear power production: the absence of a permanent waste disposal site. The nuclear power industry and the Bush administration, for their part, see an opportunity to solve a stubborn problem affecting a power source that supplies 20 percent of the nation's electricity and could provide more.

The Senate should set that larger conflict aside and focus on the merits of the Yucca Mountain plan itself. It will find that the site is deficient in several respects.

Among the most glaring deficiencies is the political process that led to Nevada's selection as the home of the nation's sole nuclear waste repository. Nevada was chosen mainly because it lacks the political clout to resist.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 called for two waste disposal sites on opposite sides of the country. The search for a second site was abandoned five years later because of pressure from New Hampshire, which was a leading candidate for selection as an eastern repository, and neighboring states. Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu now heads the lobbying effort to win approval for Yucca Mountain.

Nevada - with its vast reaches of empty, federally owned land, parts of which have been used for nuclear weapons testing - is a logical candidate for a nuclear waste disposal site.

Nevada is not the only such candidate, and other states have reason to worry about the precedent that would be set if a site were chosen on that basis. The latest estimates show that the Yucca Mountain site could not accommodate all of the nuclear waste that exists today, much less all that will be generated in the future. A search for a second site would have to begin soon, and other politically weak areas with a history of association with nuclear programs, including the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington, would certainly be on the short list.

Even a flawed political process would be acceptable if it had resulted in producing the best possible plan for nuclear waste disposal. But the process itself has undermined confidence in the adequacy of the Yucca Mountain site.

Concerns about groundwater contamination and seismic vulnerability have been brushed aside in a desperate effort to keep the search for a disposal site from reaching a dead end. Transporting tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste from 131 locations in 39 states to a single repository would involve risks that would be minimal for each individual shipment, but significant in the aggregate.

Senators will be understandably tempted by the Yucca Mountain plan. Some will conclude that an imperfect disposal plan is better than none, and that bringing the waste to Yucca Mountain would be a better solution than leaving it in 131 temporary storage sites - including on the banks of the Columbia River at the now-closed Trojan nuclear power plant. Others will see that the people who have created nuclear waste over the past 50 years have an obligation to solve the disposal problem rather than bequeathing the danger and expense to future generations.

Yet the temporary storage sites have performed well, and with safety and security improvements could continue to be used while the search for a permanent waste disposal plan resumes. Indeed, some of the most dangerous ingredients in the waste would decay relatively quickly, substantially reducing future transportation risks. And while Americans living today have a responsibility to deal with the nuclear waste they've created, the worst possible legacy would be to compound the problem by accepting an inadequate disposal plan.

Once nuclear waste finds a permanent home, it will have to be safely stored for 10,000 years or more. The United States faces the challenge of finding a storage site where waste will remain undisturbed far longer than the pyramids of Egypt have guarded the Nile. It's a task unlike any other in human history, and not one that should be rushed. The Yucca Mountain plan does not adequately fulfill the nation's responsibility to the next hundred generations and more.