Clinton on political values, arsenic and Yucca Mountain

Friday, May 3, 2002 | 3:03 a.m.

In addition to his speech at UNLV as part of the Barbara Greenspun Lecture Series, former President Bill Clinton fielded questions from the audience. What follows are his responses.

Question: What values do you believe make you a Democrat, and have your political values changed now that you are not president?

Answer: Well, the answer to the second question I hope is no because I am trying to do as a private citizen what I can to advance the things I tried to do as president.

The answer to the first question is not subject to a one-word answer.

I was born in Arkansas at the end of World War II. At the time the state had a per capita income of 56 percent of the national average. Just about everybody was poor, white or black. And at the time, we didn't have what we have now: one of the fastest growing Latino populations in America, the big Asian population, a lot of people from Southeast Asia. And (President Franklin) Roosevelt was sort of a God in my household because he believed that the power of the federal government should be used to give ordinary people the chance to work, the chance to an education, to give the veterans the chance to go to college and Social Security to the elderly.

So I had a predisposition to believing that the national government should be a partner with the private sector in making America better.

When I was a young man and highly impressionable, growing up in a state that was basically Democrat and a county that was basically Republican, John Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon for president and I thought civil rights was the most important issue. And John Kennedy called Martin Luther King's wife when he was jailed. And I never got over it. So I thought, the Democrats were the party of economic opportunity and racial justice.

When I got older, I began to think that a lot of my party's fidelity to old ways of doing things needed to be changed, and I joined the Democratic Leadership Council because I thought we had to make it clear that we could be pro-business, pro-labor, pro-growth -- and pro-environmental protection. And we had to be for welfare reform that was pro-work and pro-child rearing.

But I never believed that it would be better for me to join a party that I found myself often in sympathy with, the Republicans, when they talked about individual liberty and the importance of the free-enterprise system. I believe in all that -- the free-enterprise system did pretty well when I was president, the last time I checked. But I thought they made a lot of votes out of persuading people to resent the federal government per se instead of trying to make a change and make it relevant to the challenge of the 21st century.

No great society can do without social policy and education policy, the policies designed to create universal opportunities for responsible citizens and build a community of all citizens.

In my time, that included, among other things, trying to come to grips with the challenges presented by the rise of the gay rights movement. And, it seemed to me -- as I grew up in the South and because we had so much racism, we had sort of institutionalized hypocrisy, it was part of our charm I sometimes thought -- that when gay people didn't want to hide anymore, it seemed to me that if they were obeying the law and being good citizens, they deserved to be treated just like the rest of us, so that became the big part of what I believed.

So, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman made me a Democrat as a child. And Kennedy and Johnson confirmed my party's absolute fidelity to civil rights, even though it largely cost us the South. And in my time I hope that I proved that our party was capable of enough change to shepherd America into a new century, a new millenium and a new era in the way people work and live and relate to the world.

Those are the things that made me a Democrat and that is why I still am.

Q: Understanding the danger of nuclear waste being stored at Yucca Mountain, how would you have handled the issue if you could have served a third term in the White House?

A: Well, you all know that I disagree with the position that the administration has taken, but I would like to explain why. And I would give this answer if I was in New York or Arkansas or some other place where the utilities are pushing very hard for this to be done. So, I am not saying something in Nevada that I haven't said everywhere else.

First of all, when the Congress authorized the siting of a nuclear waste disposal facility, it was on the theory that it would be safer to gather up all this nuclear waste and put it in someplace where it couldn't pollute the ground water or otherwise do health damage, rather than leaving it in all these presently safe, but highly limited, repositories that are right by the nuclear power plants. So basically the legislation said it had to be environmentally safe.

OK, then they identified these sites, one here, one in Deaf Smith County in Texas -- which I might add is farther from any large population site than this one is -- and one somewhere else in Louisiana, which I am very uncomfortable with because I know about the salt pits in Louisiana, there is too much water there, water everywhere. I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.

So, Nevada was picked. You won the lottery.

Some people think you won because you have only four electoral votes. But still, it was supposed to be safe. Then they have an earthquake out here near the site where they are going to put the dump. It is on a fault. So then they changed the rules so that it has either got to be environmentally safe or you have to be able to work around it.

It is hard to work around an earthquake. ... Regarding all the promises that were made to you, let me just say this: I never promised Nevada that I would not approve the siting of this facility. The only promise I ever made to you was I wouldn't do it if I wasn't convinced it was safe based on the science. I never promised one time that I would not do it. ... But right now the last government report says there are unresolved scientific questions and America was promised when the Congress passed this that it would not be put anywhere until the science justified it.

So, first they had to change the standard because they couldn't figure out how to justify it, putting it someplace that had an earthquake, and then when they said the technology itself had unresolved questions, they said, well, let's just go ahead and do it anyway.

And I just think it is a mistake. I just don't think it can be justified on the merits.

I know you have a big political hill to climb. Harry Reid I know is fighting, your governor is doing what he can, but I think you need to be very insistent. At least you need to make darn sure that every single member of the U.S. Senate knows what the facts are before he or she votes on this because I can tell you, you may or may not win it, but they will have to think long and hard if you ask them how would you feel on the same facts if this were being done to you. They would be screaming to high heaven and you know it.

So don't give up. Just keep making the case.

If I were serving a third term in the White House, I would say I am going to keep my word. The science doesn't justify this but this is a real problem for the utilities. There are things the government can do to underwrite the insurance and we could spend a whole lot more money than we are now to try to figure ways to more completely neutralize this material.

So if I were doing it, I wouldn't just say I'm sticking with Nevada, they voted for me twice, that is not what I would do. I would say the science doesn't justify it, but the utilities have a problem.

Therefore, America has a problem. Therefore, let's spend a whole lot of money to try to find another solution.

We can't, with a government report out there saying there are all these unanswered questions, go ahead and put it here. It is just wrong. It can't be justified on any grounds other than everybody else is tired of thinking about it, tired of looking at it, tired of being scared of it and want to get it off their backs so they are just going to dump it on you. I just don't think it is right.

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