Editorial: Governor slights Yucca fight

Monday, Nov. 12, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

What once was a top priority for Nevada's governors - fighting a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository - now seems much less of a priority under the administration of Gov. Jim Gibbons.

The latest example involves his order last month, in response to falling tax revenue, that most state agencies develop plans for cutting their budgets by 5 percent.

He failed to exempt the state agency responsible for defending Nevada from the dangerous federal plan to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The governor's slight of this agency could not have come at a worse time. In the years before Gibbons took office, Nevada scored several legal and scientific victories against the Yucca proposal. The state is poised to win this fight, but it has one more hurdle.

The Energy Department, which oversees the project, has budgeted since 2004 $154 million for work by two large law firms. They are helping to prepare the application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to open a Yucca repository.

With the application scheduled to be submitted in June, now is the time that Nevada needs to rev up its efforts, and not falter in the end game. The state budgeted about $4 million to continue its legal fight over the next two years, an already miniscule amount that would lose $200,000 if Gibbons' proposed cuts come to pass.

Given the absolutely critical need for Nevada to ultimately prevail against the federal government, Gibbbons' failure to exempt the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects from any cuts is inexcusable.

This isn't the first time Gibbons has turned away from the Yucca fight. On Oct. 31 a U.S. Senate committee held a hearing on Yucca Mountain for the purpose of demanding answers from a recalcitrant Energy Department. After receiving an invitation to testify after making a stink about not being formally invited, Gibbons failed to show.

The next day, Gibbons was a headliner at an event in Las Vegas co-sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - a champion of the dump. And earlier this year, Gibbons appointed a pro-Yucca activist from Nye County to the state Nuclear Projects Commission, which has always led Nevada's opposition to the dump. The appointment was withdrawn after a public outcry.

Gibbons likes to make such statements as, "I still think we're going to kick their (the Energy Department) butts. I don't care how many lawyers they have."

But for his words to have any meaning at all in the deadly serious fight against a Yucca dump, they have to be accompanied by corresponding actions.