By wplog

Published Monday, Dec. 3, 2007 | 9:36 a.m.

Updated Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008 | 2:14 p.m.

WASHINGTON — Most of Nevada’s lawmakers in Washington have echoed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s pronouncement earlier this year that Yucca Mountain is dead.

But the full calendar of activity this week on the proposed nuclear waste repository is a reminder that Washington thinks otherwise.

Today federal officials will hold one in a series of public hearings on a supplemental environmental impact report on the repository, planned for about 90 miles north of Las Vegas.

The hearing is scheduled for 4 to 7 p.m. today at Cashman Center, 850 Las Vegas Blvd. It is being held to receive public input on the environmental report as well as plans for a Nevada rail line to ship highly radioactive nuclear waste from across the United States to the dump. Similar hearings are being held around the state, in California and Washington, D.C.

Comments can be sent to the Department of Energy, which is proposing the dump, via email to EIS_Office@ymp.gov or by fax a (800) 967-0739.

Then on Wednesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a critical hearing in Las Vegas to determine whether the government has sufficiently made public its 30 million page document collection supporting the repository proposal.

As I wrote in Saturday’s paper, the Yucca Mountain project was seriously setback in 2004 when the Energy department’s online collection as was ruled inadequate.

The hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m., and is to be broadcast live on Cox channel 96.

No ruling is expected for several weeks, but both sides of the Yucca debate will be waiting for the outcome: If the document collection is accepted, the project can move on to the next step; if not, if may be one step closer to the lawmaker’s pronouncement of death.