HOW HE SEES IT Politics undermines project

By JAY AMBROSE
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
It's another sign of the unreliability and even outright dishonesty of Congress that a House subcommittee wants to hold back on giving the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada the money it needs to start receiving nuclear wastes by 2010.
The problem is mainly politics. Congress has agreed that Yucca Mountain will be the national repository for waste, and the money is there: Over the years, nuclear-power ratepayers have contributed $14 billion to a waste-disposal fund. But some members of Congress have other uses for that money, such as making the deficit look like a shallower hole than it is and financing pet projects in their own districts.
The word "thievery" comes to mind for this misuse of revenue, but the worse crime is that Congress is playing into the hands of the extremist crowd that would snuff out nuclear power even though it is vital to a robust energy future.
The politicians from Nevada want to kill the project because of the NIMBY disease: Not In My Back Yard. Extremists want to kill the Yucca project because doing so would help kill the nuclear industry, which they view as overly dangerous. In fact, nuclear power is efficient, nonpolluting and extraordinarily safe; no one in this country has ever died from radioactive contamination at a nuclear plant.
Roadblocks
Getting rid of waste that remains toxic for thousands of years is definitely an issue, but hardly an insurmountable obstacle, unless the extremists can keep throwing roadblocks in front of every disposal project that comes along. If they can do that, it will become impossible to maintain the industry, and the country will suffer. Drastically increased reliance on fossil fuels would make the air that much dirtier in the absence of partial solutions that would be extraordinarily expensive, for instance.
The extremists argue that something could go wrong at Yucca and that there might be better places to store the waste. They fail to mention that it is far more likely something could go wrong where the waste is now being kept -- at 100-plus sites in 39 states -- or that the government would have up to 300 years to retrieve the waste from an exceedingly well-monitored Yucca site. A search for alternatives was launched decades ago, but scientists have come up with nothing better than Yucca, which has been studied and then studied again and then studied more.
Since Congress seems more concerned about politics than responsibility on this issue, here is a thought: Challengers in those 39 waste-holding states should remind voters constantly about the recklessness of House incumbents who did not fight for Yucca to get the money it needs.
X Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers.