Tuesday, August 03, 1999
Las Vegas Review-Journal
Editorial
Bring Your Waste Here!
Repository just one more attraction in "Earthquake-land."
In the late 1940s, American industry found itself with a huge investment in nuclear technology thanks to the breakneck race -- ordered and coordinated by the U.S. Army -- to develop a nuclear bomb before Hitler's Germany could do so.In fact, German scientists turn out not to have been as close to a working bomb as was believed, but hindsight is 20/20. Given that scientists working for the Nazis had beaten the allies to the punch with jet and rocket planes and ballistic missiles, we can only shudder to imagine what might have happened had Hitler succeeded with his own "Manhattan Project," while a less gung-ho America shrugged and said, "Let's not bother."
In any event, American industry found itself in the late 1940s with a huge investment in the new technology, and pressure quickly arose to exploit "the peaceful atom" for everything from excavating canals to generating "electric power too cheap to meter."
At that point, Washington should have stood aside and said: "The war's over; let the private market decide." Those building and operating atomic power plants would then have been required to seek liability insurance from common underwriters, who would presumably have required premiums big enough to indemnify themselves against any possible accidents -- and who doubtless would have asked, "By the way, what binding, private contracts have you guys signed to dispose of your spent fuel, later on?"
But those now-huge industrial conglomerates were used to having Uncle Sam wave away such difficulties with the magic wand of "national priority." So the original Atomic Energy Acts set -- by federal decree -- a maximum amount of damage such firms would ever have to pay per casualty should such an accident ever occur.
The waste disposal problem was handled with a similarly cavalier resort to ultimate federal power: Congress simply declared the federal government would take custody of the spent fuel, and put it wherever Washington darn well pleased.
Fast-forward to today. Had the free market been allowed to operate, those private insurance carriers would by now have required nuclear power plant operators to negotiate voluntary contracts with states or counties or nations willing to accept and store their waste for a fee.
If the federal government had a role, it might merely be to require sensible containment and rank potential sites for suitability. And where would Nevada place on such a list?
Surely not at the top, following Sunday's 5.6-magnitude earthquake near Scotty's Junction -- about 130 miles northwest of Las Vegas but even closer to the one and only site which Congress has determined suitable for "investigation" as a possible underground disposal site.
Sunday's quake was hardly unique -- it was similar in size to the 1992 quake at Little Skull Mountain. In fact, Glenn Biasi, a seismological researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno, says similar quakes have been occurring in Nevada for 30 million years, and are part of the ongoing process which is still building the state's geologically "young" geography.
They are also a reminder of the political, arbitrary and capricious process which led Congress to select a geologically volatile region as the permanent storage site for the nation's nuclear waste.