Yucca still kicking

With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been confidently stating that the Yucca Mountain Project is essentially dead. Is it?

It's long been a tactic of state Democrats to try to make political gains by arguing that the proposed nuclear waste repository, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the result of a Republican conspiracy.

Put a Democrat in charge, we've been told, and Yucca is toast, gone, kaput. Never mind that Bill Clinton occupied the Oval Office for eight years -- two of those with a Democratic Congress -- yet work on the $10 billion boondoggle continued apace.

Now comes Mr. Obama and assurances from Sen. Reid that this Congress and administration will pound the nails into Yucca's coffin.

Yet the quickest way to kill the project would be for the Department of Energy to pull its pending application to license the repository, a step Mr. Obama told folks on the Nevada campaign trail that he'd take if elected.

So far, though, nothing. In fact, Mr. Obama's energy secretary, Steven Chu, was quoted in The New York Times just weeks ago as saying the Energy Department should continue to answer questions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about the application, and that the commission should be allowed to make a decision.

Perhaps Sen. Reid will succeed in "bleeding" the project through the budget process. Perhaps Yucca is on its last legs. Good.

But Nevadans shouldn't be fooled by political rhetoric. The fact that Mr. Obama has not simply instructed Mr. Chu to halt the licensing effort indicates it may take more to kill Yucca Mountain than just brash assertions.