Aug. 6 Daily News editorial

The Obama administration’s politically inspired effort to abandon construction of a nuclear waste repository near Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has a new wrinkle. The administration now proposes to make an end-run around the 1987 law mandating that the nation’s nuclear waste be stored at the site by simply denying the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the funding it needs to complete its review of the Yucca Mountain facility.

The maneuver isn’t the total repudiation of the project that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and so many of his Nevada constituents would like to see. With the law still on the books, another administration could complete the repository and finally honor the government’s promise to take possession of radioactive waste now stored at more than 100 sites around the country. But blocking the NRC review needed to open the facility would effectively foreclose any shipment of this nuclear waste to Nevada for the foreseeable future. President Obama could say he kept his campaign promise to Nevada voters. But it would mean breaking an earlier promise to the nation, and that would have consequences.

Indeed, we’re already witnessing fallout from the administration’s most recent effort to scuttle the Yucca Mountain project. On Tuesday, the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Wash., reported that a lengthy study expected to shape final decisions on the cleanup of the Hanford nuclear reservation has been delayed due to the administration’s decision to block the opening of the Yucca Mountain repository. The U.S. Department of Energy needs more time to consider new alternatives for the disposal of Hanford’s nuclear waste.

If the administration succeeds in its attempt to shut down the Yucca Mountain project, officials at some 131 commercial reactor sites around the nation will be looking for alternatives. And there are none at this time. As a group of 25 House members wrote earlier this year in a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, there is no “Plan B” for the safe disposal of the nation’s radioactive waste. There is only Yucca Mountain.

There are an estimated 70,000 tons of nuclear waste scattered around the country at 131 sites, including 4,700 tons of spent fuel rods currently stored at the idled Trojan Nuclear Plant near Rainier. Radioactive waste is continuing to accumulate — at the rate of about 2,000 tons a year — at the nation’s 104 active commercial reactors.

The fact is, abandoning the Yucca Mountain project at this late date — more than a decade beyond the date the federal government promised to begin taking possession of the nuclear waste — would be irresponsible to the extreme. It would ignore serious strategic, economic and policy issues.

Strategically, it’s important that this radioactive waste be shipped to a central, secure site as soon as possible. Economically, failing to take possession of the commercial waste, as promised, would cost the federal government dearly. The government is contractually obligated to take the waste. Breaking that contract would leave taxpayers liable to commercial utilities for at least $60 billion in damages. Finally, abandoning the Yucca Mountain project would pretty much rule out the nuclear option as part of the nation’s energy policy.

These very practical concerns ought to trump those political concerns that fuel the effort to block the development of this national nuclear waste repository.