Columnist Jeff German: Abraham provokes wrath of Nevadans

Friday, Sept. 7, 2001 | 4:42 a.m.

Jeff German is the Sun's senior investigative reporter. He can be reached at (702) 259-4067 or by e-mail at german@lasvegassun.com

PROBABLY THE LAST thing on Spencer Abraham's mind during his tough re-election bid for a Michigan Senate seat a year ago was that some day he'd be the most hated man in Nevada.

Abraham's fate became intertwined with Nevada's when he lost that race and was appointed by President Bush to head the Department of Energy.

As energy secretary, Abraham inherited the DOE's plans to build a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The DOE wants to truck 77,000 tons of the nation's deadly waste into our back yard, and for obvious reasons most of us don't want it.

Today, though he didn't start the fight, Abraham is right in the middle of it, and he's doing little to make friends in Nevada as his decision nears on whether to recommend Yucca Mountain to President Bush.

Most believe Abraham, once a strong Senate supporter of the Yucca Mountain Project, will tell the president later this year that the Nevada site is safe to store the waste. The recommendation is expected even though scientific studies of the mountain's suitability aren't completed.

Nevadans have complained for years that the DOE, though bound by law to conduct a fair and unbiased review of Yucca Mountain, has had its mind made up from the beginning that the Silver State should become the nation's nuclear dumping ground.

Last week that opinion was reinforced at a sham of a hearing in Las Vegas to formally hear how Nevadans feel about the federal agency's plans for Yucca Mountain.

In a letter to President Bush after the hearing, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate's assistant majority leader, held back no punches.

He called the meeting, which took place within the barbed-wire confines of the DOE's Nevada operations office in North Las Vegas, a "poor attempt to gauge public sentiment" about the dump.

Reid told the president that Nevadans had to run a "gantlet of fences and guards" just to get inside the building, which was too small to accommodate the large crowd of angry speakers.

Worst of all, Reid wrote, Abraham didn't have the courage to show up to listen to the concerns of Nevadans firsthand.

Abraham's wimpy decision to stay away from the hearing left little doubt where he stands personally on Yucca Mountain.

It forced Reid to take the fight to a higher level and go after the Bush administration.

"They'll pay for this whether in court or in the political arena," a senior Reid aide says.

"The fact that Abraham didn't bother to show up for a decision that has been in the works for two decades and will have consequences into the next millennium says something about the level of concern the administration has for this issue," a senior Reid aide said.

As the Senate's second-most powerful man, Reid is someone Bush can't ignore. He can make life difficult for the Republican president's agenda on Capitol Hill.

Beyond that, Democrats are sure to exploit the Yucca Mountain issue in the 2004 presidential race.

Last year Bush narrowly won the state despite concerns raised by the Democrats that he was pro-Yucca Mountain.

Bush pulled out his victory with the help of Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn and his grass-roots political organization.

Though Guinn remains a leading opponent of the dump, his credibility in promoting Bush as a friend of Nevada likely will be tested in 2004.

And if the nuclear waste dump is closer to coming here, Nevadans will have a hard time believing they're better off than they were under the Democratic administration of President Clinton four years earlier.

Having Spencer Abraham, the most hated man in Nevada, in his administration, won't help Bush, either.