Prior to becoming Energy Secretary, Hazel O'Leary was one of the utility executives who lobbied Congress. As vice president of Minnesota-based Northern States Power Company, one of the nation's major nuclear utilities, O'Leary told Congress in 1992 that companies needed fast relief from the waste disposal problem so they could afford to build new reactors. Together we must assure that a permanent facility or a temporary facility is developed. It slashes funding for the feasibility study at Yucca Mountain, but directs DOE to begin shipping waste there anyway beginning in 1998 as originally scheduled. Instead of burial below ground, the waste will be stacked in above-ground silos.
Taxpayers take over responsibility for their waste so they can go on producing more.
Rather than solving the problem of nuclear waste, it actually makes the problem worse. During her tenure, O'Leary has placed an unusually strong emphasis on public relations. According to Douglas Elmers, who served as DOE's press secretary in the last years of the Reagan Administration, this emphasis on public relations was aimed at repairing the Department's negative image, a legacy of the years when its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, routinely lied about its nuclear activities in the name of national security. Early in her tenure, O'Leary won praise for her willingness to disclose information about the Atomic Energy Commission's radiation experiments on unwitting human subjects. But environmentalists have criticized O'Leary's approach to the waste problem, accusing her of moving too hastily to accommodate the utilities.