Regardless of one’s political predilections, the coming Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate could prove to be a significant victory for Washington residents.
Since taking over as majority leader in 2006, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, has made it a priority to block the development of a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in his home state. Never mind that Congress and President Ronald Reagan agreed in 1987 to develop the Yucca Mountain site. Never mind that a Republican Congress in 2002 agreed to push forward with the plan. Never mind that the federal government has spent some $15 billion on the process. Despite all that, Reid persistently has blocked votes to bring the repository to fruition.
In that regard, Reid was doing his job in representing his constituents; the odds are that few people would want a national nuclear waste repository in their home state. But, as Washington Post columnist George Will put it, “Rather than nuclear waste being safely stored in the mountain’s 40 miles of tunnels 1,000 feet underground atop 1,000 feet of rock, more than 160 million Americans live within 75 miles of one or more of the 121 locations where 70,000 tons of waste are stored.”
Many people in Washington fall into that category, as the federal government has, for generations, ignored its obligation to clean up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The site, about 200 miles upstream from Vancouver along the Columbia River, is regarded as the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site and holds about 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. Hanford played a key role in the Manhattan Project and in the development of subsequent nuclear weaponry. Now, decades later, radioactive material sits within a stone’s throw of the Columbia, held there for 50 years in tanks that were designed to last 20 years. The fact that some tanks are leaking is no surprise, and yet the situation has failed to generate appropriate concern from the U.S. Department of Energy.
