EDITORIAL: Japan to Yucca Mountain

OUR VIEW: Nuclear storage project work needs to be reopened

The distance from Japan to Yucca Mountain isn't all that far ---- about 5,500 miles ---- nor is the connection all that far-fetched.

From the beginning of the nuclear disaster in Japan, some watchers focused on what was happening to the spent fuel rods in storage at the doomed Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in northeast Japan.

When the massive earthquake struck, the plant's safety system dropped control rods into the cores, shutting down the reactors. But the ensuing tsunami blew out the remainder of the safety systems, those that should have kept generators running to power the cooling pumps. So the struggle has been to keep water on the fuel rods.

The spent fuel rod storage is significantly different ---- and, we think, better ---- at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on our coastline.

For instance, the storage pools are in separate buildings, not on top of the reactor buildings as in Japan. And San Onofre's operators appear confident that their safety systems of pumps and generators are more robust than those counted on by the Japanese.

But such arrangements aren't foolproof.

There is a lot of spent fuel on the site ---- indeed, not an ounce has left the plant site since the early 1980s. Once the rods have cooled sufficiently, they are put in dry casks. But the casked materials are still radioactive.

Thinning the pools by reducing the number of stored fuel rods surely would lower the risk. Casking the material makes sense (and makes room for more spent rods), but that still leaves the waste on site.

It makes sense to find a spot for it at a less populated, less vulnerable place. The material needs to be moved, say, to the middle of the Nevada desert.

The U.S. has spent $10 billion on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. It is not a perfect spot ---- it, too, is in a fault zone. But it may be the best of the options. Congress designated it as such in 1987 and reaffirmed that by legislation several times, only to have it pushed into the deep freeze last year.

Last year and this, President Barack Obama cut money from the project, and administrators took this as their cue to deep-six the project.

Recently, Republican members of the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology asked that Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko release the delayed third volume of the safety evaluation report on Yucca Mountain.

The chairman responded by saying the report wasn't finished. Republicans wrote back to charge that Jaczko unilaterally ordered all work on the project halted last fall.

Jaczko should follow his boss' promise to run a transparent government and release the document.

And Congress should tell the administration to restart the work evaluating the site.

And if a federal commission studying alternatives finds a better spot or better technique, then good for all of us.


