Not In Our Backyard

By Douglas Waller With Reporting by D. Brian Burghart/Yucca Mountain

The view from the top of Yucca Mountain in Nevada sweeps down past hillsides tangled with creosote bush to the rocky, sun-baked desert floor, with Las Vegas about 90 miles to the southeast. The proximity to that city is a problem for Nevadans--and perhaps for the future of nuclear power in this country--because the Federal Government wants to bury inside Yucca Mountain the most toxic garbage that humankind has produced: 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste generated by America's 103 nuclear power plants. A thousand feet below the mountain's peak, a tunneling machine called the "Yucca Mucker" has bored a 25-ft.-wide shaft into its center; inside that shaft, technicians in hard hats are running tests to see whether Yucca can begin receiving high-level nuclear waste, perhaps by 2010. For the past 14 years, Yucca has been the Department of Energy's only site for a permanent repository in which to store nuclear waste for at least the next 10,000 years. Some $3.5 billion has already been poured into the project, which could eventually cost $60 billion. There is no Plan B.

That makes Nevadans angry and afraid. They are worried that radioactivity from the underground storage facility could eventually leak, contaminating nearby groundwater. They have protested with lawsuits, letter-writing campaigns and public demonstrations near the site in Nevada where nuclear devices were once exploded. Yet they have been powerless to block the project. Nevada has long been the Federal Government's atomic playground (928 nuclear bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 to 1992), and the state's politicians haven't had any clout in Washington.

Now one of them does. Last May, Nevada's Democratic Senator Harry Reid succeeded in persuading Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords to bolt the Republican Party. Jeffords' switch gave Democrats control of the Senate--and promoted Reid from minority to majority whip, a perch he is currently trying to use to block the Bush Administration from putting the nuclear dump in his state. "This is wrong what they're trying to do," insists Reid. Last May, majority leader Tom Daschle flew to Las Vegas to speak at a fund raiser for Reid. "As long as we're in the majority," Daschle vowed, "[the Yucca Mountain project] is dead."

Can they make good on the threat? Federal bureaucrats doubt it. "It doesn't matter what Harry Reid says," says Jerry King, the project manager of the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain feasibility study. "We are going ahead full speed." By the end of this year, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham will probably recommend to President Bush that nuclear waste be buried at the repository. Bush's energy plan calls for construction of new nuclear power plants (the technology now supplies about 20% of the nation's electricity), but that won't happen unless the industry finds a place to store the spent fuel rods now being held in temporary facilities at plants across the country. The state of Nevada can veto Bush's decision, but the veto can be overridden if both houses of Congress pass resolutions approving the site. And that's where Reid has a chance.

As leaders of the majority, Daschle and Reid are in a position to prevent the Senate from passing its approval resolution. They can't prevent the resolution from coming to a vote, but they can mobilize Democrats and can expect help from such G.O.P. dissenters as John Ensign, Nevada's other Senator, who has warned the White House that it will lose his vote on the energy plan if nuclear waste goes to Yucca. Bush is paying attention--he doesn't have Republican votes to spare.

In a delicious irony, Reid--who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee's energy and water development subcommittee--now controls Yucca's purse strings. That means Yucca will be examined with a microscope to "make sure they can justify every penny," Reid says. He plans to shift money into studies of alternatives to the Yucca repository, such as storing the nuclear waste in concrete "dry casks" at the power plants where the waste is generated.

But Reid faces an uphill battle. "Nobody wants the waste," explains Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski, the senior Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The 31 states that have nuclear power plants are not about to stand with Nevada--who wants radioactive garbage piling up in their backyard? Even some Nevada politicians realize that. "I can read the writing on the wall," says Nevada state senator Bill O'Donnell. "We're going to get the waste." O'Donnell believes Reid should negotiate with the Administration now so that Nevada would get something from the deal, such as a railroad through less-populated areas to transport the waste, or a goodwill grant of federal land, which makes up 87% of the state.

With polls showing as many as 80% of Nevadans opposed to the project, however, bargaining would be political suicide. Before he makes any deal to take nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Reid says, he'll be "on top of the Capitol doing a full body dive." That's a performance the nuclear industry would pay admission to see.

--With reporting by D. Brian Burghart/Yucca Mountain