Finishing Yucca … because it’s paid for?

If you had a half-gallon of expired milk in your refrigerator, would you drink it simply because you didn’t want the money you spent to go to waste?

If your old bike helmet was cracked, would you wear it on a long ride because it was the only one you had, or would you take the time to get a newer, better, safer one?

The House members who toured the shuttered Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site northwest of Las Vegas on Thursday should ask those questions as they consider cramming the country’s most dangerous garbage into the ridge’s five miles of tunnel.

Yes, the United States needs a nuclear waste solution. Might Nevada provide that solution? Absolutely. But it isn’t Yucca Mountain, which was shut down and defunded years ago as part of a bargain between Nevada Sen. Harry Reid and President Barack Obama. Reid led and won a decades-long fight to keep nuclear waste out of Yucca Mountain, the federal government’s sole site under study for a repository. So nuclear waste remains stored at commercial and military sites across the country — in some cases above shallow aquifers and near population centers.

House Republicans, led by Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., are eager to restart work at Yucca Mountain and complete the repository, primarily because the country has spent more than $10 billion on the boondoggle and, well, it’s the best hole we have so we might as well use it.

“It’s an investment that we need to keep in mind as we move forward,” Shimkus said after the tour. Kind of like going ahead with a marriage to the wrong person because you’ve already dropped 10 grand on invitations, a dress and a nonrefundable reception deposit.

Yucca Mountain was a dumb idea 30 years ago, and it’s an especially dumb idea today. Burying or entombing nuclear waste for thousands of years? Insane. Think of how far technology has advanced in just the past 100 years. Where might technology be 1,000 years from now? Or 4,000 years from now? By then, we might have developed a completely safe way to reuse or eliminate nuclear waste.

Of course, to accomplish that you’d really need access to the stuff to study it.

Nevada Reps. Cresent Hardy and Mark Amodei went on Thursday’s tour with Shimkus and are clearly open to negotiating benefits for the state in exchange for accepting the nuclear waste — a deal that might be possible once Reid leaves office in January 2017.

The Nevada National Security Site — better known to longtime locals as the Nevada Test Site — is an ideal location for storing the country’s nuclear waste. It’s isolated. It’s secure. And it has miles and miles of land that will never again be suitable for productive use, thanks to all the atomic and nuclear devices that were detonated out there throughout the Cold War. There are lots of places nuclear waste could be stored out there in an accessible fashion — above ground, preferably.

But inside Yucca Mountain? Dumb. The science says it’s not safe.

I’ve never bought into the doomsday rhetoric that defines Yucca Mountain debate. Repository opponents have long seized on fear to fortify their positions. Storing nuclear waste 100 miles away from Las Vegas won’t make our faces melt — we have August sunshine to take care of that.

So forget the money wasted digging that long, super cool tunnel. If the federal government wants to store nuclear waste here, they’ll have to make a most generous offer — and put it someplace other than Yucca Mountain.

Collins’ farewell message?

Chris Collins, the suspended executive director of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, lives in a world where you get something if you give something up. The longtime opponent of collective bargaining reform is clearly worried about the course of the 2015 Legislature, where Republican majorities are prepared to pass bills that rein in the power of public-sector unions and return some to taxpayers and elected officials.

So in his column for the March/April edition the police union’s newsletter, Vegas Beat, he proposed a policy trade-off if lawmakers eliminate binding arbitration, the scam that takes public-sector pay out of the hands of government stewards. “If the legislators vote to take binding arbitration away from us, we should demand that our right to strike be given back to us.”

This isn’t a contract negotiation. This is politics. And one-party rule sometimes means there is no bargain.

Collins has been accused of misusing union funds and is being pressured to resign.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s senior editorial writer. Follow him on Twitter: @Glenn_CookNV.