Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Support for fighting repository grows slightly

Court ruling invalidating Yucca Mountain containment standards has little effect on opinions, poll finds

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State leaders called it a victory for Nevada and a significant blow to plans to bury the nation's most lethal nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

But appetite for the state's fight against the project increased only slightly in the wake of the July 9 federal court ruling that invalidated containment standards for the repository.

In a recent statewide poll, fifty-four percent said they wanted the battle to continue, while 39 percent of respondents said it is time for Nevada leaders to abandon their opposition and try to strike a deal with federal officials that will bring money or benefits to the state along with the repository.

Seven percent said they are not sure what should be done.

The poll, commissioned by the Review-Journal and reviewjournal.com, is based on answers given July 20-22 by 625 registered voters from across the Nevada.

Washington, D.C.-based Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. conducted the poll, which carries a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Nevada residents were asked the same question in July 2002, immediately after the U.S. Senate upheld President Bush's approval of the repository.

At that time, 49 percent still wanted to fight and 43 percent said they were ready to strike a deal.

Former Nevada Gov. Bob List, now a paid consultant to the Nuclear Energy Institute, said he was surprised by the latest poll results.

With the amount of media coverage the July 9 court ruling received, List expected more people to join the fight against Yucca Mountain, 100 miles of northwest of Las Vegas.

"I do believe that people still want to continue to press the state's position, but there is a growing appetite to start negotiating É a growing sense of inevitability," he said. "It doesn't mean you have to run up the white flag. It just means it's time to look at plan B."

But Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, thinks the results have more to do with how the question was posed.

"First of all, the premise of the question is flawed," Loux said. "(The repository) hasn't been approved" as the question states. "It's making the assumption that it's already a done deal."

That is why the federal court ruling seemed to have little if any effect on the poll results, Loux said.

With its July 9 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit invalidated a requirement that the repository be able to contain radioactive materials safely for at least 10,000 years, suggesting the period should be longer by possibly hundreds of thousands of years.

Brad Coker, managing director for Mason-Dixon, said last week's polling numbers seem to suggest that more and more Nevada residents have to come to view the repository as inevitable.

"Inevitability tends to soften opposition over time," Coker said.

But Loux and other opponents of the project insist the future of Yucca Mountain is as unsure as the outcome of the November election.

"When you have one of the two presidential candidates vowing to kill the project, and you have killing the project as part of the Democratic Party platform, it's hard for me to see how it's inevitable," Loux said.

A similar political slant showed through in last week's poll, with responses varying widely depending on the party affiliations of those who responded.

Seventy-three percent of Democrats favor continuing the fight, while 54 percent of Republicans said they want to see the state strike a deal.