Columnist Jeff German: Nevadans lost sight of Yucca

Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004 | 10:55 a.m.

It should have been an easy call for Nevadans in the presidential race.

We had a clear choice between a Republican incumbent pushing hard to send 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste here or a Democratic challenger promising to put us out of harm's way and kill the Yucca Mountain Project.

And yet, as of midnight Tuesday, as I sat down to write this, Nevada was one of five states too close to call in an election that was leaning toward President Bush, but still undecided.

When the final Nevada poll results were tallied a couple of hours later, Bush was declared the winner, giving him the state's five electoral votes and moving him closer to the 270 votes he needed to be re-elected.

A Bush victory is the worst possible setback for the Yucca Mountain opposition forces. Some might even call it a message of capitulation from Nevada's voters.

"It takes a lot of the zing out of the issue when the fellow who betrayed us wins Nevada," said former Sen. Richard Bryan, who has been part of the Yucca Mountain fight for all of its 22 years. "What it may do is encourage some folks to say this is an issue the public doesn't care about."

It was obvious that the voters didn't care enough about the dangers of Yucca Mountain to put John Kerry in the White House.

Bryan said the Bush campaign did a good job of making terrorism the main issue in the campaign and that tended to drown out other issues.

We certainly fell for it in Nevada. We let Bush campaign here without explaining why he lied to us four years ago when he promised he wouldn't recommend Yucca Mountain if the science wasn't right.

In the end we forgot what is really important to us -- preserving the future well-being of this state for our children.

And now that Bush has prevailed in Ohio and has won re-election, we have a president with a mandate to ram Yucca Mountain down our throats. And we will have no one but ourselves to blame.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, an ardent Yucca Mountain opponent, summed things up when I spoke to her earlier Tuesday.

"If George Bush is re-elected president of the United States," she said, "we are going to get Yucca Mountain. It's that simple."

I suspect she might regret saying those words in the heat of the battle because our elected officials, including Berkley, aren't ready to give up the fight just yet, however bleak it now looks in the political arena.

We still have the courts to turn to, and we may have a stronger general to lead the fight on Capitol Hill.

The defeat of Sen. Tom Daschle, the Senate's minority leader, in South Dakota leaves Nevada Sen. Harry Reid as the front-runner to assume his leadership duties.

If that happens, Reid will be the most powerful Democrat in Washington and will have more clout to go toe-to-toe with the Bush administration in the Yucca fight.

But it will be an administration ready to fight harder to make us the nation's No. 1 dumping ground.