America is to build a huge nuclear waste dump 1,000 feet under a mountain in Nevada, despite local objections, after the US Senate sided with President Bush.
Fifteen Democrats crossed the Senate floor and all but one Republican backed the proposed dump to house 77,000 tonnes of highly radioactive materials, most of it building up in overground stores at 131 power and weapons plants in 31 states. The measure has already been approved by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. Under a 1982 law, Congress can override the State of Nevada's veto.
The $57 billion plan, which has been debated for nearly a quarter of a century and is supposed to be operational by 2010, now goes to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for licensing following the Senate decision on Tuesday. Opponents have pledged to continue the fight with the NRC.
President Bush has described the project, which will be located at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada's gambling city, as "scientifically sound" and argues it will enhance protection against terrorist attacks by consolidating the waste in one place underground.
The nuclear energy industry and the US Chamber of Commerce have spent about $72 million since 1994 campaigning for the project. Industry officials say creation of a centralised waste repository is essential to relieving commercial reactors and weapons plants of growing waste piles and for constructing new reactors.
The spent fuel, among the deadliest substances known to man, will be solidified into ceramic pellets secured inside an assembly of strong, multilayered metal tubes before being buried in deep tunnels.
Opponents are concerned about the safety of the site itself, although remote in the Nevada desert, and fears of groundwater contamination.
Campaigning against it, however, they have sought to recruit others to their cause by also focusing on the dangers of accidental spillages or terrorist hijackings as the deadly loads are shipped across 45 states by rail and road. Trains will pass almost daily through 109 cities with a population of over 100,000.
Local opposition in Nevada, which has no nuclear plants of its own, is strong - Las Vegas has banned any transhipments and the state's Republican Governor, Mr Kenny Guinn, sought to veto the project.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of the industry, says, however, that in 3,000 shipments of radioactive waste to date there have only been eight accidents, none involving spillage or contamination. A consultant for Nevada, Dr Robert Halstead, has claimed that two crashes, in 1962 and 1964, did involve leaks that had to be cleaned up.
He has estimated that if a hypothetical shipping cask containing radioactive caesium-137 had been breached in a devastating fire last July in a Baltimore railway tunnel - where temperatures reached up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit - between 4,000 and 28,000 local deaths would have been caused.
"We are being forced to decide this issue prematurely, without sufficient scientific information, because this Administration is doing the bidding of special interests that simply want to make the deadly waste they have generated someone else's problem," the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Mr Tom Daschle, told colleagues. Disappointed Democratic Senator Harry Reid, from Nevada, insisted "this is not over" and said the fight would continue before the NRC and in the federal courts. He attacked nuclear lobbyists and their "unending source of money" for perpetuating "the big lie" that the Nevada dump was urgently needed.
The waste can be kept safely where it is, avoiding the transportation risks, he insisted.
Governor Guinn promised to pursue at least five lawsuits the state has filed challenging the Yucca project. Critics say the project won't solve the nuclear waste problem. Waste shipped to Yucca will be replaced by an almost equal amount of new waste generated by nuclear power plants in the coming decades, according to government figures.
Because Congress limited the storage capacity to 70,000 tonnes, extra space - at Yucca or elsewhere - will be needed by 2034.
