Bob Bennett's decision to throw in with our neighbors in Nevada and oppose efforts to entomb the nation's most dangerous nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is the right thing to do. It's the right thing for Nevada, it's the right thing for Utah and it's the right thing for the West.
Why? Because it doesn't make sense to risk an accident transporting the stuff through as many as 43 different states to a central repository somewhere, whether it's Yucca Mountain or the dry-cask parking lot proposed for the Goshute Reservation in Utah's Skull Valley.
If dry-cask storage is as safe as the nuclear industry claims, then it can be used to keep the stuff temporarily at the reactor sites where it is now.
Over the long term, it makes more sense to reprocess and recycle the spent fuel rods to produce more energy. President Carter issued a directive in 1978 to outlaw commercial reprocessing out of fear that plutonium and enriched uranium produced during recycling could fall into enemy hands for weapons. But a new process separates fissionable materials from the waste, but not from each other, so no weapons-grade material results.
True, there still would be waste, but it would be dangerous for hundreds of years, not the thousands of years for the material that is proposed for burial or parking now. Plus, the volumes of waste from recycling would be much smaller.
We've been arguing since 1997 that Utah should join Nevada in the effort to get this done right. However, Utah's two U.S. senators, Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, have taken the view that if the waste could be dumped on Nevada, Utah would be in the clear because interim storage on the Goshute Reservation would no longer be attractive. In 2002, they both voted to overrule the Nevada governor's veto of the Yucca Mountain project.
However, Bennett reversed course this week. He has come to the realization that the engineering challenges (geological, hydrological and metallurgical) to permanent storage at Yucca Mountain probably will not be overcome. There also is a new theological factor. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced this month that it opposes the PFS plan for Utah, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved.
Utah's members of the U.S. House all have come around, too. That leaves Hatch as the only outlier.
How about it, Orrin?
