Letter: Nuclear, coal industries score wins

Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007 | 7:10 a.m.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced this week that he was able to secure a 21 percent cut to the funding of the wrongheaded and wasteful proposal to bury high-level nuclear waste outside of Las Vegas. Jubilation throughout the city! The county! The nation!

This is a big enough cut that the Yucca Mountain project should actually feel it. Score a big one for Nevada!

But New Mexico's retiring senator is in love with nuclear power and nuclear waste. Sen. Pete Domenici finagled a giant giveaway to the nuclear power industry. Billions in loan guarantees will make it nice and easy for dangerous nuclear waste to proliferate. Nuclear waste isn't bad enough; the package included giveaways to dirty coal, too, totaling up to the tune of $30 billion.

How can one senator from New Mexico have bamboozled so many good-thinking people in Washington?! Domenici slipped it into the appropriations bill shortly before Christmas.

The omnibus bill is impossible to stop at the 11th hour; too many must-have actions are included in the huge funding legislation. To achieve all the good features, our representatives in the House "had" to vote for it. Of course there are good things in this monster bill.

But we are wasting billions of dollars on dirty energy technologies that we could be putting to work on solar voltaics, solar thermal, geothermal and wind technologies.

In a last-ditch attempt to bring sense to the process, on Monday a collection of 17 major environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, sent a letter to each and every person in the House of Representatives, urging them to do the unthinkable - vote against the omnibus bill.

The House passed the bill Monday night with huge giveaways to toxic nuclear and dirty coal, and we are all left with a huge cleanup in the new year.

Jane Feldman, Las Vegas

The writer is conservation co-chairwoman of the Southern Nevada group of the Sierra Club.