Friday, August 15, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Groups urge panel to reject Yucca provision in bill

Seventeen environmental and government watchdog groups sent a letter this week to members of a defense authorization conference committee urging them to reject a provision in a bill passed by the House that could tighten secrecy on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project.

"This troubling provision, not contained in the Senate legislation, would inappropriately grant expansive new authority to the Department of Energy to restrict public access to unclassified information related to a broad range of nuclear energy and waste activities," says the letter, sent on Wednesday.

The groups, which include Public Citizen, the Federation of American Scientists, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, fear the provision could lead DOE to restrict information about transportation routes to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository or limit disclosures about possible threats from airplane crashes near the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"This section of the House committee's bill is a damaging development for Yucca opponents," Public Citizen's Lisa Gue said in an e-mail Thursday. "Thankfully, the provision does not appear in the Senate version, and hopefully it won't be part of the final legislation."

The DOE-requested provision was made part of a defense authorization bill that passed the House on May 21. The bill is awaiting a conference committee with the Senate that is expected to get under way when Congress returns from recess in September.