Few environmental challenges are more daunting than that posed by the safe storage and disposal of high-level nuclear waste.

In 1987, Congress hastily designated Yucca Mountain, Nevada as the "only" place to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain is located just 95 miles northwest of the City of Las Vegas (the fastest growing metropolitan city in the country).

Yucca Mountain proponents, unsatisfied that the site's suitability has not yet been determined, are pursuing an alternative, "temporary" storage site until Yucca Mountain's permanent suitability is determined. This legislative abomination is known as H.R. 45, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1999.

Transportation

H.R. 45 opens the door to the unprecedented transportation of high-level nuclear waste and fails to address concerns about shipment safety.

Under this legislation, only the State of Nevada would become the nation's dumping grounds for high-level nuclear waste. However, there are 43 states in this country whose roads, highways, and railways would be used to transport the waste. Each of these states is subject to possible nuclear contamination and nuclear disaster.

Under this bill, over 100,000 shipments of nuclear waste will occur over the next 30 years. This means fifty million Americans within half a mile of the transportation routes could be exposed to the hazards of these shipments.

This nuclear waste would be shipped in casks that are loaded onto trucks, trailers, and rail cars. America's vehicle accident rates seem to skyrocket each year, yet current cask regulations fail to consider the full range of plausible accident conditions and do not require compliance testing of full-scale cask models.

The bill also fails to guarantee accident mitigation funding for states through which this waste will be shipped. Furthermore, the bill contains broad preemption's of local and state law, hampering efforts to maximize transportation safety.

Transportation safety concerns remain unanswered. Instead, H.R. 45 mandates that shipments begin in June of 2003. This leaves little time to ensure the maximum possible transportation safety for our nation's citizens.

Repository Standards
H.R. 45 guts environmental standards for a permanent repository.

Despite serious flaws with the proposed site, studies are ongoing to determine whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada is capable of hosting a permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste. In addition to prejudicing the studies by designating Nevada as the host for the waste (even before the studies are complete), H.R. 45 runs roughshod over crucial environmental protections.

Yucca Mountain faces numerous unresolved technical issues. H.R. 45 tampers with the integrity of the ongoing studies by explicitly revoking regulations (10 CFR part 960) that set guidelines for determining site suitability.

With this negation, provisions of key site-performance characteristics, like the travel time of water and climatic stability, would be swept away, casting doubt upon the integrity of any site suitability determination.

In fact, 219 environmental organizations recently petitioned the Department of Energy (DOE) for disqualification of Yucca Mountain, citing these very reasons.

The petition is based on DOE models that indicate the site cannot meet the conditions established by the guidelines. These are the same guidelines being conveniently revoked by H.R. 45.

In addition, current law directs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to promulgate regulations to protect the environment from repository radiation releases, but H.R. 45 prohibits EPA's efforts to carry out this responsibility.

Instead, the bill would create a single performance standard that allows annual radiation exposures of up to 100 millirems to an average member of the surrounding population, a level four times the amount allowed by regulations for other storage facilities.

According to established risk factors, employed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), this exposure level is associated with a lifetime risk of one excess cancer death for every 286 exposed individuals. These standards are also inconsistent with the National Academy of Science's recommendation. This is a death sentence Nevadans literally cannot live with.

Interim Storage
H.R. 45's "interim" storage provisions exclude citizen concerns.

H.R. 45 designates the Nevada Test Site as the proposed "temporary", or "interim" storage site to be used until Yucca Mountain's site suitability is determined. Put simply, nuclear waste will be stored "temporarily" on an uncovered, above ground, exposed concrete pad.

What happens if Yucca Mountain (the original proposed site) is rejected? Is Nevada to expect that the "donor" states will take back their waste? Fat chance. A more likely scenario is that the nation's waste will sit on this exposed concrete pad forever. There is nothing "temporary" about this "interim" storage site.

To make matters worse, this "temporary" site is a seismically active area where, over the last 20 years, more than 630 seismic events occurred within a 50 mile radius. These quakes registered a 2.5 magnitude or greater.

Sadly, H.R. 45 ignores these facts and would actually allow construction of an "interim" waste site to begin with the simple submittal of a license application.

Preemptions

H.R. 45 curtails a broad range of environmental laws.

H.R. 45 contains broad preemptions for environmental legislation.

The legislation states that any state or local law that is "inconsistent" with the bill's requirements is preempted. In addition, this bill preempts any law that requires additional safeguards to protect citizens beyond the dangerously high 100 millirem standard.

For example, the Safe Drinking Water Act would be prohibited from protecting the vulnerable groundwater supplies under Yucca Mountain.

NEPA

This bill circumvents the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), thus producing a meaningless Environmental Impact Statements (EIS).

The purpose of an EIS is to make the best environmental decision by examining all construction alternatives. However, H.R. 45 eliminates this concept. The "interim storage" site selections, license application, construction, and operation are exempted from any EIS.

Fortunately, the actual issuance of a license for "interim storage" still requires an EIS.

However, this EIS cannot question the size, the need, or the timing of "interim storage."

It also cannot question any alternatives to storage, the alternatives to the site, or alternatives to the design criteria of the interim facility.

Finally, the EIS may only look at transportation impacts if they are generic in nature. The EIS fails to address specific transportation routes and their potential deadly impacts to the communities through which they pass.

The case is solid in my opinion. H.R. 45, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act is bad. It is bad for the environment, bad for Nevada and bad for this country.

Then how should we solve the dilemma of storing nuclear waste? Transmutation.

In my estimation, the Yucca Mountain project has become a failure, and has needlessly expended millions of taxpayer dollars. Unfortunately, the nuclear waste storage debate has lost sight of an important goal-citizen safety. H.R. 45 fails to consider economic and social implications, and throws out health, safety and environmental issues. In their political haste, proponents have lost sight of other solutions.

This nation has taken the wrong approach to nuclear waste disposal. The ultimate answer to our nuclear waste storage dilemma is transmutation.

Today, scientists have developed proven systems to transmute radioactive waste into non-radioactive elements, thereby eliminating the radiological hazards and waste disposal problems.

Moreover, as America attempted to develop the technology to transport nuclear waste, the safest "on-site" storage capability available was perfected. This is known as dry cask storage. Additionally, the scientific, economic and safety arguments point to dry-cask storage as the best solution to store high-level nuclear waste.

On-site storage enables the waste to be easily retrieved for the purpose of transmutation. This on-site storage, coupled with the technology of transmutation, is truly the best long term solution for our country.

In the future, the transmutation of spent nuclear fuel could prove a valuable energy resource. In this process we can drastically reduce the waste volume from approximately 90% unused nuclear fuel to less than 10% unused.

In addition, the transmutation process substantially decreases the half-life of nuclear waste.

America is realizing that Yucca Mountain is not the answer. Neither is "interim' storage. When taking a closer look at the details, it is easy to see a realistic solution to the nation's nuclear waste dilemma. It is time to abandon the track of political haste and look to sensible, responsible alternatives.