Senate vote nears on revamped N-waste bill

Anti-nuclear activists consider Yucca Mountain to be a "leaking hole in the ground.

September 16, 1999
Web posted at: 12:53 p.m. EDT (1653 GMT)

A revamped version of the so-called Mobile Chernobyl bill is expected to hit the Senate floor as early as Friday and anti-nuclear activists are busy working to ensure the bill's demise.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act Amendments of 1999 "will give the Department of Energy the tools it needs to complete the Yucca Mountain program," Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a statement when his legislation cleared the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in June.

Anti-nuclear activists consider Yucca Mountain to be a "leaking hole in the ground" and do not believe it is a fit repository for the nation's nuclear waste. Furthermore, they fear that a disastrous accident is bound to occur as the waste is shipped to Nevada from around the country.

Under Murkowski's legislation, nuclear waste would be shipped to Yucca Mountain for interim storage as soon as the facility has received licensing and construction approval. This is expected to occur in 2007.

"Yucca Mountain is such a mistake," said Kevin Kamps, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "There needs to be more research done on the alternatives."

The anti-nuclear activists believe that Yucca Mountain is a mistake and they will not wait around until the Department of Energy completes a suitability study on the site in 2001 to begin their campaign to stop the proposed nuclear repository.

While the Clinton administration has not come out and said that it is opposed to Yucca Mountain, Clinton is expected to veto the legislation because it shifts the responsibility of setting the radiation protection standards for Yucca Mountain from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

This move does not sit easy with Clinton or the activists because they view the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as biased toward the nuclear industry.

"The NRC is an expert, independent, nonpartisan body whose standards are based on solid research, consistent with the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences," said Murkowski. "I believe the industry has a very legitimate long-term concern over having to abide by EPA standards that are politically driven and not scientifically based."

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service would like to see nuclear waste remain at the reactor site until a better alternative to shipping the nation's nuclear waste to a suspect hole in the Nevada desert is found.

"We are calling on the Department of Energy to back down on the arbitrary race to deal with the waste. The decisions that are made will have consequences into the distant future," said Kamps.

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