Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
7/25/2014
Nye County, Nev., home of Yucca Mountain, intends to fight back against the state of Nevada’s planned request for additional funding for activities related to squashing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing review of the proposed repository for the nation’s high-level nuclear waste. Two weeks ago, Nevada’s Board of Examiners, which includes Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval and Secretary of State Ross Miller, approved a $1.4 million funding request from the state’s Attorney General’s office and the Agency for Nuclear Projects to combat the results of the licensing review, including the upcoming release of the Safety Evaluation Reports.
The request now goes to Legislature’s Interim Finance Committee for a meeting in late August where Nye County intends to argue that the safety and science elements of the project should be known first before taxpayer dollars are used to oppose it. “We are asking them to take a step back and review what they are actually trying to do in regards to funding the state’s opposition to Yucca Mountain,” said Darryl Lacy, Nye County’s director of its Nuclear Waste Repository Project Office. “The state has essentially a no where, no how, no way approach to Yucca Mountain, and a delaying tactic is what they have done all along. Our approach is to let the process move forward to at least see if it can be done safely or not. If we are going to be good stewards of the taxpayer’s money, we need to make our decisions based on good science, not on emotional ignorance.”
Nye County has maintained that there is still local support for the Yucca Mountain project. The county, along with eight others, signed a resolution last year calling on the NRC and Department of Energy to finish the licensing review to allow the science of the site to determine its suitability. If the science was agreeable, the resolution said, Nye County would still be a willing participant in hosting the facility. “We believe Nevadans need to have a fair accounting of the science before were just say no,” Nye County Commissioner Dan Schinhofen said. “The knee jerk reaction of all them is really not productive. We need to follow the law, see the science, and then decide if it is safe or not. With them, just saying it’s not safe, what are they afraid of to hear the science?”
County May Have a Tough Time Getting Funding
The financing to help move the process forward, though, does not appear readily available for the county. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the host community is allotted funds to help in oversight of the licensing of the repository, but the Department of Energy has denied the county’s request for funds in the past three years. Without that source of income, Nye County will not have the same level of technical expertise dedicated to reviewing the project. “I’m sure we will issue comments on the SERs, but I’m not sure where we are going to get the resources to review them at the levels we used to do it,” Lacy said. “We used to have a fairly extensive staff of experts and consultants who helped us with those activities, but it’s going to be a much smaller exercise than what we used to do.” Part of the reason for the state’s request for additional funding is to maintain its technical staff and legal fees associated with reviewing the upcoming release of the SERs.
