Government protection: heaven help us.(Scan)

While ordinary citizens and their elected representatives are thinking about immediate issues like the war against terror, federal judges are concerning themselves with the future. The long-term future.

In July, a three judge panel of the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia blocked implementation of the Energy Department's plan for burying nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada--a project that has been in the works for 17 years and on which the government has already spent some $9 billion--on the ground that the government's standards for protecting the public from radiation leaks at the site extend for "only" 10,000 years.

Without specifying just how long protection needs to be guaranteed, the panel cited the danger that, about 270,000 years after the waste is buried, someone standing just outside the fence surrounding the site could receive a radiation dose 60 times higher than the allowable limit. The three judges urged that the site be designed in accordance with a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences to prevent leaks when the danger is forecast to be highest--in about 300,000 years.

To put things in perspective, let's recall that civilization in any meaningful sense originated in the Middle East barely 5,000 years ago. How can a government body or court take account of what conditions will be like 270,000 years from now? Assuming that civilization lasts that long, isn't it more than likely that some means of reinforcing the Yucca site will have been ...