Editorial: Sleeping with the enemy

Friday, July 20, 2007 | 7:21 a.m.

Gov. Jim Gibbons has made big claims about being an outspoken critic of the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain during his political career, including his 10 years in Congress, but his actions this week show his talk is nothing more than hot air.

Despite having caught the Energy Department violating a court order, Gibbons is allowing federal workers to continue to illegally take water for the next month so they can try to salvage their disintegrating case for Yucca Mountain.

Meanwhile, the governor appointed Nye County Commissioner Joni Eastley, a Yucca supporter, to the state Nuclear Projects Commission, which has been a driving force against the dump. As first reported Wednesday by Las Vegas Sun columnist Jon Ralston, she resigned this week after her appointment was made public. Gibbons expressed surprise at her stance and told the Associated Press that he had been "assured" she was not a proponent of the dump. By whom? Nye County has long been aggressively lobbying for the dump, as everyone in Nevada politics knows - unless you believe the governor's office, which claims ignorance.

As Jeff German reported in Thursday's Las Vegas Sun, Gibbons and his aides met with Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and state Yucca watchdog Bob Loux this month. The unanimous opinion: Get tough and stop the Energy Department's illegal work. Gibbons, however, rejected the advice, reminding those at the meeting that he is, by training at least, a geologist and a lawyer.

With Gibbons' blessing, State Engineer Tracy Taylor, Nevada's water czar, this week gave the official approval for federal workers to carry on for 30 more days because stopping the program suddenly "may result in the waste of significant financial resources."

A waste of significant financial resources? What do Gibbons and his administration think Yucca Mountain is? The federal government has spent more than $8 billion over the past two decades and has only shoddy science and a 5-mile-long hole in the dirt to show for it.

No Nevada politician of any real stature thinks sending 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste hurtling across the nation's highways to Nevada is safe or a good idea - except Gibbons' confidant Bob List, a one-term Republican governor voted out of office in 1982 who has been a paid nuclear industry lackey.

Unlike in his time as a congressional backbencher, Gibbons is now in charge, and he is in jeopardy of breaking Nevada's once unified stance against Yucca Mountain. He should reverse course immediately. Otherwise his unconscionable and unacceptable actions will tell Washington that Nevadans think it is acceptable to turn our state into the nation's radioactive dumping ground.