Overeager for nukes?

Courier Journal - Editorial

The last time there was serious discussion of nuclear issues in Kentucky, Crittenden Fiscal Court was deciding not to apply for a federal grant to study whether the Western Kentucky county could become a nuclear waste storage site.

That was 1992, and the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island incidents were still relatively fresh in Kentuckians' memory, as was the Marble Hill nuclear plant site shutdown, just across the Ohio River in Indiana.

Fifteen years later, companion bills in the Kentucky legislature propose removing a state requirement for a permanent disposal facility to handle radioactive waste, before any nuclear plant is built in the state. The sponsors -- Sens. Bob Leeper, I-Paducah, and Charlie Borders, R-Russell, along with Rep. Steven Rudy, R-West Paducah -- think the time has come to talk seriously again about nuclear power generation, even in the nation's third biggest coal-producing state.

The objections of environmentalists -- especially to on-site waste storage -- are reasonable. The long-discussed but problem-plagued Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada, which was supposed to open back in 1998, may never be built. That makes figuring out what to do with these dangerous byproducts a major dilemma.

Meanwhile, basic reactor technology has advanced since the height of anti-nuclear resistance. Some 204 nuclear facilities across the United States produce about 20 percent of the nation's power. France, with nearly no coal and no oil at all, gets almost 80 percent of its power from 58 nuclear plants.

The Sierra Club and Greenpeace continue to oppose nuclear power. They promote, instead, a greater emphasis on energy efficiency, as well as public and private spending on clean, alternative, renewable energy sources. However, Environmental Defense Fund spokesman Tony Kreindler sees it differently. He says, "Given the scope of the climate problem and the emissions problem, we need to look at all the energy options we have, and nuclear is one of them."

The EDF makes sense, but the problem with the bills in Frankfort is that they don't just look at the nuclear option. They push it, by endorsing on-site storage of potentially deadly nuclear plant waste. There is no proven technology that justifies a serious discussion of that.