The "not-in-my-back-yard" position is infamous in government circles. It clogs good decisionmaking and turns public policy into a contest of wills and interests that often have little to do with the merits of a particular issue.
By vetoing a bill this week that would have turned Yucca Mountain, Nev., into the nation's only repository for nuclear waste, President Clinton struck a blow against this kind of selfish thinking, if inadvertently. Clinton was concerned with, among other things, how the bill might have threatened the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to determine radiation exposure standards at the repository. Utahns, however, should have been concerned about how the bill would have turned remote parts of the West into places everyone sends their unwanted trash. Fully 95 percent of the nation's glowing waste would have passed through Utah on the way to Yucca Mountain, exposing everyone here to the dangers of an accident.Does that sound like more "not-in-my-back-yard" hysteria? Perhaps a little history lesson is in order.
In 1982, the federal government promised it would take possession of the accumulated waste generated by nuclear plants nationwide (the number of states generating this waste has now grown to 40). This waste was being stored on-site at nuclear plants, and much of it was becoming unstable. The government set a deadline of Jan. 31, 1998, giving itself 16 years to solve the problem.
By the mid-1980s, the Department of Energy finished its scientific study of the best geologic sites for storing the volatile waste. It chose three sites in Tennessee. That's when the real "not-in-my-back-yard" fights began. Since then, political winds shifted the site westward to Nevada, and the government's deadline came and went. Now, a new deadline for opening a repository has been set for 2010.
Actually, the history of this problem goes back even further. In 1972, the Atomic Energy Commission chose salt deposits near Lyons, Kan., as the best site for nuclear waste. That proposal met a similar fate.
The issue here is not whether Yucca Mountain is a suitable site to store waste. The issue is whether designating it as the only repository -- one that would accept waste shipped to it from all over the country -- is good public policy. Clearly, it isn't. A much better solution would be to designate a few regional repositories, thus reducing the distance waste would be transported.
Given how politically charged this issue is, one can clearly see why Utah should continue fighting on another front, as well. A consortium known as Private Fuel Storage is continuing its plans to put a "temporary" repository on the Goshute Indian reservation west of Salt Lake City. No state that allows such a thing should think of it as temporary, nor should it underestimate the message it would send about its own willingness to accept others' nuclear trash.
As long as everyone else is protecting their own back yards, Utah would be foolish to allow itself to be exploited.