Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Yucca fight won’t end

Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2002 | 8:24 a.m.

"IS THE SUN throwing in the towel?"

What a strange question I thought as I continued to read Frank Perna's letter. Why on earth would this newspaper, the first daily newspaper in this state to challenge the federal government's scheme to bury the nation's high-level nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain and the only one to consistently rail against the thought of such an outrage in the face of significant risk, be throwing in the towel?

More importantly, why would one of our longtime readers and more prolific letter writers think that we were doing just that? I read his letter over again just to see if I was missing something. I wasn't.

What Frank and most of us are experiencing is that time we all believed might come, and the seeming helplessness that would come with it when the president of the United States tapped Nevada as the host nobody else wants to be.

With all of our stories, all of our editorializing, all of our prognosticating of what might happen if people don't focus on this "dumpsite" thing, the fact remains that we may be within hours or days of President George W. Bush singling out Las Vegas to be the busiest place in the world when it comes to dealing with radioactive waste.

And that reality, my friends, is a most depressing one.

For years we have covered this growing story and our major industry's singular lack of attention to the dangers lurking within it, with the belief that nobody who occupies the White House would dare be so callous and uncaring about the people who live in Nevada and, specifically, Las Vegas that they would designate us to be the burial ground for the deadliest poison known to man. Somewhere in the back of our minds we wanted to believe that whoever was our president, that good and common sense would prevail and that science would get the nod over back room politics.

But, alas, by the time you read this or shortly thereafter, it looks like we have been wrong, duped by our own naivete and shortsightedness. If what we are hearing from our own Nevada GOP leaders is correct, President Bush will shove that stuff down our Yucca Mountain and his party faithful will cover his behind for doing it. That, all by itself, is depressing.

But that doesn't mean the fight won't continue. More to Mr. Perna's point, I think Nevada's mothers and fathers, in an exercise of the family values that call for the protection of one's children as the paramount duty of parents, will just move our fight to a different arena.

Whether it be in the courts of this land, the ballot boxes of this state or, to take a page out of our more violent history, on the roads and across the railroad tracks that run behind our homes, I believe that the people who live here will no longer trust those in positions of power -- political, business or social -- to watch out for them and their families.

And that is the most depressing thought of all because people should have the right to expect leadership from those in power and the luxury to trust that it will be exercised properly.

So far, Nevada has lost on all counts.

Not that it isn't all the other guy's fault because each of us must share the blame on that account. I know that when Bill Clinton was president of the United States he committed to our then-governor, Bob Miller, that only science would determine the outcome of Yucca Mountain. And not once on his watch did those who favored sticking Nevada with the nation's nuclear garbage get their way. Even during some of his darkest personal moments, President Clinton honored his word and vetoed Congress' plan to start the trucks rolling our way.

Candidate Bush made a similar pledge to Gov. Kenny Guinn when he was asking Nevadans for their support. He told us that science and not politics would drive any decision about Yucca Mountain. How I would like to believe in him now!

With every report from every scientific organization saying how much the Department of Energy has botched the science or, just as bad, not completed it before recommending the site to President Bush, and that any decision about moving forward was premature and potentially dangerous, it seems incredulous that Bush would plow ahead.

And, yet, that's the message from his own party faithful in this state in their own efforts to lessen the pain to their political futures and maintain some semblance of party unity behind a very popular president.

So let's get something straight. I don't know one American who isn't foursquare behind this president's war on terrorism. Just like we should be regardless of who our president is.

But I don't know of a single Nevadan, except those who think only of their pocketbooks with no regard for their families or neighbors, who believes that a decision by the president to site the waste dump at Yucca Mountain is anything other than a payoff to the power industry and its congressional and DOE supporters.

To believe otherwise is to ignore a very simple reality when it comes to nuke waste: If this stuff is so safe why on earth does everyone want to move it out of their own back yards and into ours?

And that, Mr. Perna, should provide the answer to your question. If the Sun is throwing in the towel on this fight we are throwing in the towel on our future as well. And that, sir, is not who we are.

The real question is this: Is the rest of Nevada up for this fight?