Kerry Flips AGAIN -- Nuclear Waste & Yucca Mountain

Posted August 13, 2004

John Kerry took time in Nevada this week to criticize President Bush's decision to use Yucca Mountain as the national repository for nuclear waste. Kerry said the decision was based on politics, not science. Yet in 1999, Kerry encouraged speeding up the timing of making Yucca Mountain ready to accept nuclear waste.

HUMAN EVENTS has obtained a March 23, 1999, letter [see below] to then-Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski (R.-Alaska), signed by Kerry, calling for the acceleration of a nuclear waste acceptance schedule.

When the letter was sent to Murkowski, the Committee was working on legislation to advance the siting and construction of Yucca Mountain -- the site designated by Congress in 1987 as the only site the Department of Energy was allowed to study as a future permanent storage repository.

The thrust of the Kerry letter is that there was an established order for shipping waste from various locations across the country, but Kerry wanted nuclear waste from decommissioned power reactors to be allowed to cut in line.

The letter states, "We request that such legislation [the Yucca bill] include an accelerated waste acceptance schedule." Apparently, John Kerry had no problem with Yucca Mountain in 1999 -- his focus was on sending nuclear waste out of Massachusetts to Yucca Mountain as quickly as possible, regardless of the staunch opposition from Nevada, including two of Sen. Kerry's fellow Democratic Senators.

Kerry's Running Mate Supported Yucca Mountain, Too

When President Clinton vetoed the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act (the Yucca Bill, S. 1287) in 2000, John Edwards voted to override the veto (the override attempt failed, garnering 64 of 67 votes needed). On May 8, 2000, Inside Energy reported on the vote:

Murkowski said he was pleased that 13 Democrats voted to override the veto. One of those, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., had previously voted against the bill. Asked what accounted for Edwards' change of heart, a spokesman said that since the earlier vote, the senator had "won some very specific commitments" from Carolina Power & Light, one of the utilities with nuclear power plants in North Carolina.

According to the spokesman, CP&L said the passage of the bill and its implementation "would dramatically reduce the need for additional storage space for spent fuel at the Shearon Harris plant in Wake County." The utility, he said, assured Edwards that if the bill were implemented, it would not need to use a fourth spent fuel pool at the plant and that 33 fewer fuel assemblies would need to be stored at the site or transported from other plants in the state. [...]

Nevada Democratic Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid issued a statement Tuesday calling the vote to sustain the president's veto "a huge victory for every Nevadan." "This attempt to override the President's veto," they said, "was nothing more than a futile attempt by the Republican leadership to do an end-run around existing law to help the very influential and high-powered nuclear lobby stack the deck against Nevada."

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