‘Mighty expensive dinosaur’

Monday, June 8, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.

Some of the folks in the House of Representatives who are responsible for overseeing how much money is spent on the Yucca Mountain project are none too happy with President Barack Obama’s plan to kill the multibillion-dollar boondoggle.

The Las Vegas Sun’s Lisa Mascaro reported last week that members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development expressed frustration and outrage about Yucca Mountain’s fate as Energy Secretary Steven Chu appeared before the committee Wednesday.

“We got a mighty expensive dinosaur out there,” Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., said about the project 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. “It seems an awful shame to me we spent that money. I know folks in Nevada don’t like it, but sometimes things happen in Arkansas that I don’t like.”

Sure, the Yucca Mountain project is a “mighty expensive dinosaur,” but that’s precisely what Nevada’s elected officials warned the federal government that it ultimately would have on its hands if it pursued the madness of building the dump. But members of Congress and a number of presidents were hell-bent on pushing this dump through despite this state’s objections that Yucca Mountain, in an active earthquake zone, would be a geologic nightmare as a place to bury man’s deadliest waste.

Another committee member, Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, wasn’t pleased that the Obama administration wants to form a commission to look at alternatives to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

“I find it amazing that the committee’s going to look at a geologic repository but the one geologic repository we’re not going to look at ... is Yucca Mountain,” Simpson said. “To me it’s more politics than science.”

First of all, it wasn’t Nevadans who introduced politics into this process. That was seen back as far as 1987 when Congress decided, for purely political reasons, to study only Yucca Mountain, not three sites in the country as had been planned. Is it any wonder Nevadans dubbed this legislation the “Screw Nevada Bill”?

It’s not Nevada’s fault Congress set up a tainted process to decide where to store 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste. Their protests to the contrary, it’s obvious some members of the House committee who hold the purse strings of the Yucca Mountain project are taken aback at seeing a president stand by his commitment to do what’s scientifically right — no matter the political consequences.