Yucca issue lacks national appeal

Benjamin Grove and Suzanne Struglinski

Thursday, Oct. 7, 2004 | 9:19 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- In August, when President Bush visited New Hampshire's Seacoast region, the Portsmouth Herald's editorial page wrote him a letter outlining a lengthy list of local concerns.

Included were issues ranging from the war on terrorism, Medicare reform and the No Child Left Behind Act to the future of Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Canadian border security, and reviving small-boat fishing.

While a New Hampshire nuclear power plant has 246 tons of radioactive waste, the paper didn't mention a word about nuclear waste or Yucca Mountain.

Despite Yucca's brief moment in the national spotlight after recent Nevada visits by Bush and challenger John Kerry, neither candidate has discussed the proposed nuclear waste dump much outside the state.

Yucca barely registers at all as a campaign issue -- even in regions where nuclear plants generate electricity -- and where many voters would love to see the nuclear waste piling up in their backyards shipped off to Nevada.

"Not only have they not talked about it, they haven't even been asked about it, as far as I'm aware," said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire Bush adviser, long-time GOP insider and the state's national committeeman.

Yucca Mountain might seem like a salient issue for political activists in the nation's 34 nuclear-power states, and there are clear differences to be drawn. Bush approved the plan to create a national radioactive waste repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas; Kerry vowed to block it.

But state and local political activists told the Sun that Yucca Mountain has been virtually non-existent this election season in 10 "battleground" states with nuclear power -- Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.

They said the issue has been absent in heated advertising wars, in the news, at fund raisers and rallies, and in numerous visits by the two candidates themselves.

Officials for Bush and Kerry won't say why that is. But there are lots of theories: the voters don't care; the issue is too complex for the stump; it's a political hot potato for both.

Kerry critics say he can't trumpet an anti-Yucca stance in the nuclear-power states where waste-weary voters rely on plant jobs and the states receive hefty tax revenues and emissions-free energy.

And analysts say Bush would only help Kerry by raising the issue.

"You can imagine what Kerry would do, he would rush back to Nevada and quote the president," said Lawrence Jacobs, University of Minnesota political science professor, and director of an intensive study of 2004 presidential politics in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. The study has tracked what issues are important to voters in those states and nuclear waste has not registered anywhere on the list, Jacobs said.

Kerry is using Yucca to "out-flank" the president in a rare instance in which a single issue tends to dominate the political landscape, Jacobs said.

"He's playing to the voters in Nevada," Jacobs said.

Two top Bush-Cheney spokespeople declined to explain why the campaign isn't hammering Kerry on Yucca outside Nevada. But they were quick to blast Kerry for "pandering" to Nevadans.

"What we have seen is John Kerry's eagerness to tout his newfound opposition of Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but he has refused to discuss it in the 39 other states where nuclear waste is currently stored," Tracey Schmitt, Bush-Cheney's Western states campaign spokeswoman. "It's disingenuous and it's disconcerting. Clearly, he is vulnerable, and that is why he hasn't talked about it outside Nevada."

But Kerry's campaign hotly disputes that Kerry is vulnerable on the issue of nuclear waste.

"This is an important issue in this election outside Nevada," Laura Capps, a top Kerry spokeswoman, said. "This is a classic example of President Bush breaking his promises."

Capps said it was highly unusual for a candidate to make a state-specific issue like Yucca Mountain the "message of the day" for more than 50 media covering a campaign, as Kerry did in Las Vegas in August.

State and local campaign coordinators for Kerry and Bush said people in other states generally just don't think or care about Yucca as much as voters in Nevada do.

Eric Schultz, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign in New Hampshire, said Yucca had not been a campaign issue in the state, despite the Seabrook nuclear plant. Seabrook generates 57 percent of the state's electricity and has produced 246 metric tons of radioactive waste awaiting shipment to Yucca.

Both Bush and Kerry have visited New Hampshire since Kerry's big anti-Yucca speech in Nevada, but neither mentioned waste.

Locals believe the waste piling up at the Seabrook plant is a real problem and their general feeling is: "We certainly need something quickly, and if it's Yucca Mountain,it's Yucca Mountain," Portsmouth Herald managing editor Shir Haberman said.

But local voters are simply focused on other issues such as Iraq, the economy and the nearby shipyard, he said.

The newspaper has not written any editorials on Kerry's anti-Yucca stance.

Other observers said Yucca Mountain just isn't a sexy campaign issue for either party.

Nuclear waste policy and the long history of the Yucca project are complex and technical compared to any number of splashier stump subjects.

Still others said Yucca Mountain isn't an easy issue for Bush or Kerry because it begs thorny questions.

For Kerry: Isn't the waste more safely stored in a single, secure repository? And: If not Yucca, where?

For Bush, there are the tricky issues of a controversial 10,000-year safety standard and the nagging question of transportation: How do you move the waste to Nevada, without accidents or sabotage?

Plant officials say waste can be shipped safely. But many voters are worried about waste traveling through the state, environmental activists said.

"There is a great deal of concern about cask safety and the irradiation of communities where people live and work and go to school by the tracks," said Janet Zeller, director of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in North Carolina, home to some of the biggest waste stockpiles in the country.

Lots of people are more concerned about waste shipping than living near waste, several plant-region locals said.

"People have learned to live with having waste around them," said Dan Trevas, communications director for the Ohio Democratic Party.

Still, several state Bush activists said Yucca Mountain could be a winner if it were forced into the public discourse, saying that nuclear waste is a sensitive issue to many people who live near plants.

Terry Lowe, chairman of the Republican Party in Ottawa County in Ohio, home to the Davis-Besse reactor, agreed. He said he had no idea that Kerry has vowed to stop Yucca.

"If he (Kerry) ever came to Ohio and came out against Yucca Mountain," Lowe said, "there would be fallout."

archive