Yucca Mountain getting whacked: Do you care?

I guess now we’ll find out just how much Nevadans hated the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

Year after year statewide opinion polls suggest Nevadans by a wide margin don’t want a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. For some, it’s a safety issue. For others, it’s a state’s rights concern. Still others don’t like the idea of the project getting rammed down our throats in exchange for what has seldom sounded like more than chump change in the long run.

The big news out of Washington is that President Barack Obama, at the strong urging of his friend and chief ally Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-In Trouble Back Home), is pushing to choke off final funding for the project. Even those diehard Yucca supporters, and there are some, are coming to the conclusion that the dump is finished.

Reid to a great extent, and other members of the Congressional delegation to lesser extents, deserves a mountain of credit for using his political clout to bludgeon the project into submission. For another politician, this kind of victory might be trumpeted far and wide as a great accomplishment.

On Monday, in a news release on the President’s budget, Reid said, “Additionally, I applaud the President’s decision to end funding and pull the license application for the proposed dump at Yucca Mountain. Those of us who have been on the front lines of this fight for years know how important this development is to Nevadans.”

But for Reid, it appears to be falling into a category marked, “Yeah, but what have you done for us lately?”

My question is simple: Do Nevadans tired of Reid care enough about the Yucca Mountain Project to give him credit for killing it? Is that a game-maker for them?

(Some surveys suggest it isn’t.)

I have to wonder what Reid would have to do to quiet his growing legion of political critics. Retire, I suppose. But that’s not happening.

The challenge for Reid’s GOP opponents will be to balance their anti-Yucca positions in Clark County with their softer posturing in Republican stronghold counties where Yucca means jobs and federal largesse.