The Senate's nuclear waste. (Behind the Lines).

ACCEDING TO THE DEMANDS of the aggressive nuclear lobby, the U.S. Senate voted 60-39 in July to authorize the opening of a permanent high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The vote overrode a veto by Nevada, which does not want the dump. Under prior law, after presidential

Nuclear waste has been building at nuclear power facilities throughout the United States, which has continued to generate nuclear power without any plan for permanent disposal of waste.

The Yucca Mountain proposal envisions waste being transported by train and truck from across the country to Nevada, and encased in the mountain.

"This vote loudly declares that scare tactics and fear mongering cannot supplant common sense and sound science," says Bruce Josten, U.S. Chamber of Commerce executive vice president for government affairs.

Safe energy advocates -- Josten's "fear-mongerers" -- harshly denounced the Senate vote. They have criticized the Yucca Mountain plans both for risks it poses during transport of enormous amounts of waste (calling the waste-laden trucks and trains "mobile Chernobyls," given the near-certainty of transportation accidents) and the environmental and public health risks at the site, where leakage into groundwater supplies is feared.

Critics have also called attention to the enormous costs associated with the project, noting further that by the time dump construction is completed, the dump will be inadequate to handle all of the existing waste in the country.

Anti-nuclear activists vowed that the Yucca Mountain project would be stopped despite the Senate's vote. They promise lawsuits under a variety of theories, and a massive campaign of civil disobedience.

In Germany, "it now requires some 30,000 police and $100 million to move a cask [of nuclear waste] just 250 miles, disrupts the transportation network of much of the country, and requires a police state in large parts" of the northern part of the country, says Steve Kamps of the Radioactive Waste Project at the Nuclear Information and Resources Service (NIRS). "The U.S. is talking about thousands of shipments, averaging 2,090 miles. There will be thousands of protesters along these routes.