Someone forgot to drive a stake into Yucca Mountain’s heart
They came to a place called the ghostbar to hold a wake and celebrate the final demise of the Yucca Mountain Project.
They laughed and reminisced about their decades-long battle to defeat the Department of Energy's nuclear waste repository plan, and took a moment to remind each other to remain vigilant until the last coffin nail had been pounded.
There was former U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan leading the line of giddy eulogists: "How sweet it is! Let's hear it for Nevadans because today is a day to celebrate a victory."
There was former Citizen Alert director Peggy Maze Johnson cracking wise on the hapless hole in the ground: "They could turn it into a brothel. It's in Nye County!"
And on it went back on March 9. There were toasts and short speeches and T-shirts for sale by the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.
And there was praise for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who along with Bryan and others waged a long-term, underdog political battle in Washington to trip up Yucca at every turn. Victory came earlier this year when the Department of Energy moved to withdraw its repository construction license bid, shutting down the Yucca project office and relocating its work force.
"Reid was the one that closed the deal," Bryan said.
The meaning was clear: No Reid, no Yucca Mountain wake.
I came away from the Yucca wake with a couple of observations.
First, a gathering of most of the progressives in Nevada sure fit easily in one section of a bar on the 55th floor of the Palms.
Second, I think I saw the corpse move.
No, I'm certain of it.
Yucca might be pulseless, but it's obvious from the maneuvering emerging recently some people haven't given up hope the corpse will rise again. In the House of Representatives on Wednesday, members of a subcommittee that oversees Yucca appropriations criticized the Obama administration's call to shut down the project, a decision seen as a blatant political gift to Reid.
If Reid is defeated in November, does anyone seriously think Yucca will remain deceased?
South Carolina and Washington state legislators are mounting efforts to sue over the Yucca decision, and other states are expected to follow. Clearly they're attempting to buy a little time.
After watching the endless sparring over Yucca for the past two decades, I long ago became jaded listening to the scientific and political arguments for and against it. Yucca fatigue is a common malady in Nevada, where polls show a majority of the population opposed to the project, but several rural counties favorably disposed to its glowing potential as a revenue source. In tough economic times, the elusive promise of jobs makes them salivate.
If you doubt the corpse is playing possum, listen to the rhetoric of the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate. They all say they are against Yucca Mountain, but several embrace the concept of using the repository site for "reprocessing" of the waste material. This is an obvious attempt to court votes in rural counties that like the project, but it also shows a lack of commitment to keeping the dump out of Nevada.
Reprocessing sounds great until you consider the fact the waste must be transported, stored on site and handled. It simply makes no sense to endorse reprocessing but oppose the repository. The former is less stable and tested than the latter.
The reprocessing talk is something unabashed Yucca critic Bryan calls a "slippery slope" that begs the question: "Well, if you're willing to take some, why not take it all?"
With congressmen carping, states suing, Reid running behind in the polls and Nevada Republicans reprocessing their rhetoric, I'm starting to sense Yucca Mountain's death has been greatly exaggerated.
John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.
