Sunday, Feb. 19, 2006 | 12:33 p.m.
WASHINGTON - Tessa Hafen, former press secretary for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Monday will formally launch her campaign to unseat Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev.
She will make the announcement at Gordon McCaw Elementary School in Henderson, which she attended. Hafen, 29, is expected to be flanked by Reid, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., and her father, long-time Henderson City Councilman Andy Hafen. The venue also was chosen to draw a distinction between Hafen and her opponent: Hafen is a third-generation Nevadan. Porter was born in Iowa.
Voters in Congressional District 3, which is nearly evenly split between registered Democrats and Republicans, can expect Porter's campaign to stress the second-term congressman's political experience, which dates back 20 years to his days as a Boulder City Councilman. Hafen's political experience mostly has come as a Reid aide. Observers say Hafen will have difficulty separating herself from herself politically from Reid while relying on his well-oiled campaign money machine.
She faces a proven winner in Porter, a careful politician with nearly $1 million cash on hand. Porter has a competing event at the same time as Hafen's campaign kickoff. Porter will be at Sunrise Hospital to unveil his "Federal Family Health Information Technology Act," a bill aimed at creating electronic health records for 8 million federal employees.
The Porter event was planned months in advance so the timing was coincidental, Porter spokesman T.J. Crawford said.
President Bush this week will play traveling salesman, pitching his ambitious proposal to make America a leader in a global resurgence in nuclear power. Bush's Saturday radio address focused on new energy technologies and he touted his Global Nuclear Energy Partnership plan.
The plan includes a call for the nation to recycle the spent nuclear fuel waste from nuclear power reactors. Critics say that developing the reprocessing technology is unnecessary and far too costly. They also say it creates a nuclear weapons proliferation risk because the process separates plutonium out of the waste, which in the wrong hands could be used for a weapon.
Reprocessing has implications for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain because it could reduce the toxicity of waste bound for burial there, advocates say.
Bush is likely to push for new energy technologies and a nuclear power resurgence at several other Bush events this week, including stops in Milwaukee; Auburn Hills, Mich.; and Golden, Colo.
The trade group that acts as a top cheerleader for Yucca Mountain in the next month or so will launch its largest public relations campaign ever to tout nuclear power, and secondarily, the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
The Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute's outreach blitz coincides with the Bush administration's advocacy for nuclear power expansion worldwide. NEI envisions 15 to 20 new U.S. plants operating - with an equal number under construction - by 2030. The nation currently has 103 operating nuclear reactors.
To build support nationwide for expanding nuclear power, NEI has embarked on its broadest campaign yet, designed to create a large pro-nuclear coalition. To that end it is seeking out organizations of all kinds, from seniors groups to health-related organizations and even environmental advocates - traditionally, the staunchest foes of nuclear power.
NEI is also planning advertising to tout the benefits of nuclear power - principally, that it creates no greenhouse gas emissions like fossil fuel-burning electric plants.
The campaign also will try to debunk what nuclear industry officials say are lingering myths - that nuclear power is unsafe, too expensive to develop and that there is no solution to the waste problem, NEI spokesman Scott Peterson said.
NEI has long said the solution to that problem - highly radioactive spent fuel piling up at nuclear power plants nationwide - is to bury it at Yucca.
Benjamin Grove can be reached at (202) 662-7436.
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