McCain: We may not need Yucca

While Nevada officials were about to rally Tuesday in Las Vegas against plans for licensing a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain was in Colorado saying such a facility might not be necessary.

"I would seek to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that could collect and safely store materials overseas that might otherwise be reprocessed to acquire bomb-grade materials," McCain, R-Ariz., said in a speech on international nuclear security at the University of Denver.

"It is even possible that such an international center could make it unnecessary to open the proposed spent fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain," McCain said, referring to the volcanic-rock ridge 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

At the rally in the Clark County Government Center's amphitheater, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who was aware of McCain's remarks, took the opportunity to note that McCain's voting record in favor of the Yucca Mountain repository speaks for itself.

"Everyone here should understand that John McCain is an advocate" for Yucca Mountain, Reid said.

"John McCain is on the wrong side of that issue," said Reid, the Senate majority leader who was joined at the rally by former Sen. Richard Bryan, chairman of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects, other state and Clark County officials, environmentalists and Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev.

In a call with reporters, McCain's senior foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, said the idea of an international repository is only practical at one site: Siberia.

"So when Senator McCain indicates a willingness to support the idea of an international repository and because the United States controls in effect the destination of some 75 or 80 percent of the spent fuel in the world ... an international repository will not happen without U.S. support and will not happen without a place to go," Scheunemann said.

He said an international repository would be primarily for spent fuel that's in other countries.

"But Senator McCain did indicate a willingness to entertain the possibility that if the spent fuel repository is up and running, if the security and safeguards are sufficient that we could possibility send some of our spent fuel there too," Scheunemann said.

Later, McCain's regional spokesman, Jeff Sadosky, said McCain is "just looking at new proposals out there. He believes they have merit and should be looked at because they could potentially alleviate the need for the Yucca Mountain site."

An official with the Nevada Democratic Party said McCain was trying to flip-flop on his traditional support for the Yucca repository.

The remarks were delivered a day before the candidate is scheduled to campaign in Reno.

"McCain did not explain how this international repository would work, and it is a disingenuous 180-degree turnaround for the Arizona senator," said Kirsten Searer, the Nevada party's deputy executive director.

Presidential candidates for the Democrats, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., have said they are opposed to building a repository at Yucca Mountain for 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel and defense wastes.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said McCain was on the right track in steering the nuclear waste debate away from Yucca Mountain and toward waste reprocessing.

"I will be talking to Senator McCain a lot about that," Ensign said in a call with reporters. "My belief is you don't need a repository, you need to recycle the waste."

Ensign said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close McCain ally, shares that view and "we are going to work on Senator McCain that way when he is president."

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., believes McCain's reference to creating an international nuclear waste repository lacked detail and raised more questions, her spokesman David Cherry said.

"While it is still unclear how Senator McCain hatched this plan, Congresswoman Berkley has enormous concerns about shipping nuclear waste overseas given the dangers involved," Cherry said.

Berkley "welcomes any acknowledgement from the McCain camp that Yucca Mountain is a failure and should be scrapped, but that does not mean she agrees with this concept as an alternative," Cherry said.

Jon Wolfstahl, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said McCain's reference to international nuclear storage seemed to come "out of left field."

"It is possible that Russia might build a storage facility for countries in East Asia, but McCain seems to be suggesting some other country is going to accept our huge (the world's largest) stock of spent fuel and that this might be a way to avoid opening the spent fuel repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Talk about pandering," Wolfstahl wrote in a posting to the Web site of the National Security Network, a self-described progressive organization.

At the rally, organizers said they intend to collect thousands of signatures for a petition that asks the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reject the Department of Energy's license application for the planned repository when it is submitted in June.

Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto said she is prepared to make legal challenges as soon as DOE submits its license application because she believes it will be incomplete, lacks a safety plan and fails to protect the public and the environment from deadly radioactive materials.

Allen Benson, a DOE spokesman for the Yucca Mountain Project, said, "We will submit a complete license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will conduct a very thorough and rigorous review. We look forward to participating in the NRC process."

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.