No Home for Hot Trash

Nuclear waste is nasty stuff. The inevitable by-product of all atomic-power plants, it remains radioactive for up to 3 million years and necessitates heavy shielding to protect any human or animal life that may come near it. The U.S. Congress believed it had conquered the problem of where to put such waste when in 1987 it ordered the Department of Energy to focus on building a national dump site in Nevada. By 2003, the Government promised, spent fuel from the country's 110 commercial nuclear reactors would be trundled across states and safely buried deep within Yucca Mountain, an isolated peak about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. But that forecast, like an earlier one predicting a national dump site by 1998, proved too rosy. Last week energy officials pushed back the opening to at least 2010.

Deputy Energy Secretary Henson Moore claims that the revised schedule is necessary to satisfy scientific and environmental concerns. "This is in fact a realistic reappraisal rather than a delay," he says. But to critics, it is yet another sign of bureaucratic bungling. Two years and $500 million into the Yucca project, the federal agency appears to have accomplished little. John Tuck, Under Secretary of Energy, conceded last week that the department did not have a "scientifically sound plan" for assessing the site's suitability as a dump.

Nevada citizens, environmentalists and scientists are adamantly opposed to the Yucca site. They contend that the area is geologically insecure: Lathrop Wells volcano is twelve miles away, and Nevada ranks just behind Alaska and California in frequency of earthquakes. As a result, Nevada has refused to issue the environmental permits needed for a study of the site. The DOE announced last week that it has asked the Justice Department to file suit against the state.

For the nuclear-power industry, which has been hoping for a rebirth with a new generation of safer reactors, the DOE's latest postponement appears to be a heavy blow. But the industry professes to be unperturbed. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it will not delay licensing future nuclear plants as long as it looks as if a waste repository will be in operation within the first quarter of the next century. Given the Government's record so far, even that target may prove to be a problematic one.