Election hasn’t changed Yucca Mountain’s future

WASHINGTON - The election brought no dramatic shifts to the nuclear waste landscape, allowing Nevada leaders to shelve fears that big changes might have allowed the Yucca Mountain program to be resurrected.

President Barack Obama was returned to office, winning Nevada in the process, and Democratic gains allowed Sen. Harry Reid to solidify his standing and position himself to win re-election this week as Senate majority leader.

The Obama administration and Reid engineered the shutdown of the Nevada nuclear waste repository site beginning in 2009.

Obama's annual budgets since then have zeroed out funding, and Reid has blocked efforts in Congress to restore money to the project.

"Looking at the election results overall nationally and in Nevada, the outcome is about as good for the state's opposition to Yucca Mountain as we could have asked for," said Bob Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

Halstead said there were no changes in the state's congressional delegation or in the Legislature "that would send a message to the other side that we are doing anything but fighting Yucca Mountain."

In the House campaign for the new 4th Congressional District, Republican Danny Tarkanian advocated building a nuclear waste reprocessing factory at the Yucca site in Nye County, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

But Tarkanian was beaten by Democrat Steven Horsford, who is expected to follow in Reid's footsteps to oppose any shipments of high-level nuclear waste to the site.

Reps. Joe Heck and Mark Amodei, Republicans from Nevada, have said they are open to alternative uses for the site but not necessarily involving nuclear waste, or appreciable amounts of it.

Newly elected Republican Sen. Dean Heller and Democratic Rep.-elect Dina Titus have opposed high-level nuclear waste storage in Nevada.

While the state's firewall in Congress remains in place, there is a wild card looming.

A three-judge federal appeals court panel is expected to rule before the end of the year on a lawsuit that would force the Obama administration to resume Yucca Mountain license hearings that were shut down at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Plaintiffs in that case, including the pro-Yucca Mountain commissioners of Nye County, charge the commission acted illegally in terminating the hearings.

Agency lawyers argue the hearings were ended when it became clear Obama was turning off the funding spigot.

One change in the nuclear waste landscape occurred in Nye County, where two-term County Commissioner Gary Hollis lost re-election to retired aerospace worker Frank Carbone.

Hollis has been the county's liaison on nuclear waste, traveling regularly to Washington to confer with lawmakers and industry groups as Nye County has lobbied for the repository or some role in whatever might replace it.

By all accounts, Yucca was not an issue in the Hollis race, and Nye County Commissioner Dan Schinhofen said nothing will change in the county's position or strategy favoring Yucca Mountain.

"There's not going to be any interruption," said Schinhofen, who hopes to be appointed to fill Hollis' role as the lead commissioner on nuclear waste.

Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760. Follow him on Twitter @STetreaultDC.