Reid putting politics before public interest on Yucca Mountain
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 7:49 AM PST
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E-mail this articleThe midterm elections may have dealt a fatal blow to plans for the nation's first nuclear waste repository near Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a long-time foe of the project, becomes the new majority leader in the Democrat-controlled 110th Congress. The Associated Press reported Friday that Reid convened a conference call with home-state reporters not long after the Nov. 7 election to declare plans for the repository "dead right now."
That's no idle posturing on Reid's part. As majority leader, he will determine what legislation reaches the Senate floor. Reid will be in a position to block annual appropriations bills, cutting off funding for construction.
Could the project lay dormant for however many years the Nevada senator is majority leader, waiting for a more favorable political climate? Possibly, given the billions of dollars and more than two decades of planning already invested in the Yucca site. And, too, the government has no Plan B for keeping its promise to take possession of the some 50,000 tons of nuclear waste now stored at commercial utilities in 31 states, including more than 4,700 tons at the idled Trojan power plant in Rainier.
Still, further delay would prove very costly for American taxpayers, who already owe $243 million in damages for the government's failure to meet the original 1998 deadline for accepting shipments of radioactive waste from the nuclear plants. This nearly quarter of a billion dollars owed commercial utilities is just a fraction of the potential public liability, which has been estimated at about $60 billion.
The earliest possible completion date for the repository now is 2017. Even with the project's completion on that date, which now looks unlikely, taxpayers would continue to pay damages for the next decade.
The government broke a contractual agreement to take possession of this waste in 1998 -- after commercial utilities held up their end of the bargain by collecting more than $20 billion from ratepayers to help fund construction of the waste facility. The lawsuits won't stop coming because the government lacked the competence to meet its contractual obligations, and they certainly won't stop because Sen. Reid assumes a leadership position that allows him to further delay or kill this project.
The senator is putting his political interest ahead of the public interest -- at taxpayers' expense.
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