The 10,000-year plan

Last year, a federal appeals court threw a monkey-wrench into the government's plans to bury an estimated 77,000 tons of the nation's deadliest nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain repository in the Nevada desert.

Though the court denied the state of Nevada's attempt to prohibit the U.S. Department of Energy from using the Yucca Mountain site as a dump for high level nuclear waste, including 36 million gallons from the Savannah River Site, it did order the Environmental Protection Agency to extend its plans to prevent dangerous nuclear leaks beyond 10,000 years.

This past week, the EPA responded to the court order with a proposal to limit exposure near the facility, 90 miles from Las Vegas, to 15 millirems a year for the next 10,000 years, after which the allowable level would rise to 350 millirems annually for a million years.

Surely this ought to be a safe enough plan, given that a standard chest X-ray provides about 10 millirems of exposure. Of course, Nevadans aren't satisfied; they're in a not-in-my-back-yard mode. U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., characterizes the EPA's plan as "voodoo science and arbitrary numbers."

He could be right. After all, who knows where the human race will be 10,000 years from now? But then Nevadans, and some environmental zealots as well, won't approve of any science that green-lights Yucca Mountain - they're opposed no matter what.

As for looking down the road a million years, let's just say the human race should count itself lucky if it's not extinct by then.

In any event, Mal McKibben of the CSRA-based Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness got it right when he noted that, in 10,000 years, folks will surely have the technology to deal with nuclear waste - they don't need for us to do it for them now.

Let's just hope in the here-and-now that the EPA plan will satisfy the activist court's arbitrary ruling that Yucca's nuclear-waste leakage must be safe for more than 10,000 years. Even if the court looks favorably on the EPA, it wouldn't end the legal challenges to the Yucca project, which is supposed to be ready to begin receiving the nuclear waste by 2012.

The next move is to get the facility licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - which, in turn, could make future lawsuits even more difficult to succeed. The sooner the nation's high-level nuclear waste can be safely buried underground in one place, the better off we'll all be. And the harder it will be for terrorists to wreak their death and destruction.