Backing Yucca funding into a corner

Nevada's congressional delegation has the Department of Energy backed into a corner when it comes to funding for a nuclear-storage project at Yucca Mountain. And that's right where they want it.

One of the critical issues to be determined for Yucca Mountain remains exactly how to get tons of radioactive waste shipped from 39 states to the remote Nevada desert. When it comes to raising alarms among states and communities on those routes, the transportation plan may well prove to be one of Nevada's most effective arguments to swing public opinion.

Yet the congressional delegation - Harry Reid, John Ensign, Jim Gibbons, Shelley Berkley and Jon Porter - will be fighting a $186 million appropriation for the Energy Department for planning the transportation routes. The DOE is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't.

On a bigger scale, the Energy Department is racing a December deadline to submit an application to the Nuclear Energy Commission for the necessary permission to actually open and operate a nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain.

So President Bush proposed a huge increase in the department's budget - more than double, to $880 million - to help it do the work needed for the application. DOE administrators say the project is behind schedule because - surprise! - it has been underfunded for many years, thanks in large part to the efforts of Reid and previous representatives.

What is conveniently forgotten is how the purpose of the project changed. Instead of studying whether Yucca Mountain could safely store nuclear waste for thousands of years, it became an engineering assignment to determine how Yucca Mountain could store nuclear waste.

Meanwhile, a study at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas showed the Yucca Mountain project in one year contributed $195.7 million to Nevada's economy and accounted for 3,650 jobs. That's a pretty good employer, although far from being among the state's leaders.

If we were greedy, we would say Nevada has the perfect strategy going - string out the study of Yucca Mountain for as long as possible to reap the benefits of those paychecks to engineers and scientists, without actually seeing the repository built.

But as long as the study goes on, there remains the chance Nevada will become the national nuclear dumping ground. We'd rather see that threat removed forever.