DOE HAS A DEATH GRIP ON THE EVIDENCE

Policy making in government so seldom depends solely on the merits that
it's a surprise when it does.

Of course, we're seldom surprised.

What we are accustomed to seeing is juice, high powered lobbyists and
campaign contributions distorting the process. But sometimes it's the most
mechanical things that draw attention away from the merits. For instance,
at the Nevada Legislature some issues are saved until late in the 120-day
sessions so they can be negotiated and enacted in the last minute rush out
of the public eye.

Who would imagine that scheduling would be a factor in policy making?

Or consider the printed copies of government documents. In 1956 the
American Medical Association and the American Bar Association jointly did a
study of marijuana in all its legal and medical aspects that provided far
more realistic findings than those normally given by drug enforcement
officials. When the report was issued, the U.S. Department of the Treasury
counterfeited it. Author Mike Gray described the counterfeit as having the
"same blue cover, same typeface, even the same title but with two words added."

And with entirely opposite conclusions.

The AMA/ABA report, Gray writes, had been printed in an edition of a few
thousand copies, while the feds "flooded the country with its double."

Here's another example. After years of federal depredations and misconduct
on Nevada's public lands, Congress in 1986 ordered a massive report on
those activities by the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Interior Department.

Special Nevada Report was completed and published in 1991 in a two-inch
thick volume. The three agencies put the document in a format designed to
make it as worthless as possible to users. There was no index. The page
numbering system and other organizational systems in the book were a mess
understood only by the report's authors.

Gov. Robert Miller once used the published copy of his budget
recommendations to the legislature to try to get his state government
reorganization enacted. His budget director wrote the budget as though the
reorganization were an accomplished fact, with the reorganization woven
throughout the document in what Miller and his aides assumed would be an
unremovable mesh. Unfortunately, they played it too cute and the
legislators told them to go back and do part of it over.

Then there's the U.S. Department of Energy's 6000-page environmental impact
statement on the proposed Yucca Mountain site for a federal nuclear waste dump.

Normally, on a project of this scale, the EIS is distributed widely so the
public can have full access to it. For instance, the multi-volume EIS on
the Carter administration's plan to install the MX missile system in Nevada
and Utah was always easily available in the public libraries in the two
states and got heavy use by residents.

You won't find the DOE's Yucca EIS in the state's libraries. It seems the
department, to serve the forty-plus affected states, published only a few
dozen copies of the EIS. As best I can tell, there is only one copy here in
the state capital. For that matter, outside the DOE's security facilities
in the desert, there may be only one copy in the entire state.

The document is available on-line, but it's of limited utility. As the New
York Times has reported, the on-line version is "hard to navigate because
of its size and organization," and state officials and community activists
across the nation believe it was deliberately engineered that way.

State nuclear projects director Robert Loux says the documents in the EIS
"are so big and contain so many graphics that it chews up so much of your
hard drive space ... unless you have a real high speed line and even then
it takes a long time to download and look at. ... It makes the assumption
that everyone has Internet access and that everyone almost has to have high
speed lines in order to access it. It clearly has been the policy ... with
the Yucca Mountain EIS to attempt to minimize the number of people who had
the opportunity to look at it, review it, make comments. Perhaps they're
afraid of other people filing lawsuits because it's defective, at least we
believe, legally, in most areas."

The restricted access to the EIS has sharply handicapped community leaders
across the country in opposing transportation of waste and environmental
lobbyists in Washington trying to build their case.

Gov. Guinn is critical of the limited access to the EIS because it
undercuts both the state's ability to fashion its court challenges to the
project and its lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. This last may be giving
Congress more credit that it deserves. There are Nevadans who remember
vividly how the three volumes of evidence stood untouched on most of the
desks of members of the U.S. Senate who voted on the impeachment of U.S.
District Judge Harry Claiborne of Nevada. Members of the Senate are not
going into the vote on Yucca Mountain with the merits of the issue on their
minds.

The campaign contributions of the nuclear power industry and the pools of
fuel rods in their home states count more than any evidence. But the
ability to build a counter to those factors that might change the political
equation on Capitol Hill is being crippled by the DOE, in effect,
withholding evidence.