Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Sun Editorial:

Thank you, Harry

Yucca Mountain File

Sam Morris / Las Vegas Sun

Via satellite from Washington D.C., Sen. Harry Reid addresses representatives from the Department of Energy during the DoE’s public hearing on the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository Sept. 5, 2001.

We knew the day would come. We just weren’t sure when. Seventy-five-year-old Harry Reid has announced that after five terms of representing Nevada’s best interests in the U.S. Senate — the longest run of any senator from our state — he will retire into the waiting arms of his loving wife, Landra.

They have much to celebrate, and we — and our children and grandchildren — have much to be thankful for, including a legacy that will reach far into future generations of Nevadans.

The senator’s list of accomplishments, from preserving the environment to helping bring health care to millions with his championing of the Affordable Care Act, will certainly frame his legacy. But his everlasting success story will surely be his success in staring down the nuclear energy industry and keeping Nevada free of the highly radioactive nuclear waste that outsiders wanted to ship from distant states and bury inside Yucca Mountain.

Nothing better epitomizes his courage and commitment to Nevada than his ability to thwart the politically immoral effort to force lethal fuel rods from out-of-state nuclear power generators down our throats and into the bowels of a volcanic ridgeline just 90 miles outside of Las Vegas.

No other state would stand for it; no other state has offered to deal with it. Everyone looked to Nevada, poked us in the chest like a bully and expected us to cower. But Harry doesn’t cower. He pokes back because he knows what’s at stake is nothing less than the safety, welfare and economic security of all Nevadans.

Nevada was against the ropes from the first round when Congress overpowered us and designated Yucca Mountain as the ultimate repository of spent fuel rods. While they’re no longer efficient for power plants, they remain so deadly that the search was launched to find a place to hide them for more than 100,000 years.

Nevada, along with Deaf Smith County, Texas, and Hanford, Wash., were identified as possible burial sites, but Congress decided to quicken the pace and told the Energy Department to just focus on Yucca Mountain.

After some poking and prodding, it became clear Yucca Mountain wasn’t quite up to specs. The plan was to find a solid hunk of real estate that could, on its own, safely contain nuclear waste. Instead, it was realized that Yucca Mountain was actually going to have to be a fixer-upper, a deficient tomb for high-level nuclear waste and in desperate need of a vast amount of engineering work inside to get it to pass inspection. Testing prompted concerns about Yucca being too porous to offer a protective shield, of risk of earthquakes and moisture dripping onto the caskets and corroding them.

Had this been a house, potential buyers would have howled in protest and walked away.

But in this case, what with so much money in the coffers, the momentum was to move forward and find ways to make the mountain safe. And what assurances were there that such a level of safety could be reached and maintained? There were, after all, no other models for this sort of facility, so assessments of Yucca’s long-term safety (meaning 100,000 years) were based on assumptions and computer modeling.

Meantime, someone suggested, how about moving nuclear waste to Yucca’s front door on a temporary basis until the tunnels inside were made leak-proof? Harry and his Senate colleague from Nevada, former Gov. Richard Bryan, put a stop to that notion.

Taking a longer view of the problem, Harry consistently and successfully used his leadership role to cut more than $1 billion from then-President George W. Bush’s Yucca Mountain budget requests. For good measure, Harry redlined $27 million that was sought by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose job was to license the storage project. And from 2005 on, Reid continued to chip away at Yucca Mountain’s budget until President Barack Obama totally eliminated funding for the project in 2011, 2012 and 2013. When efforts were made to restore funding, Harry squashed them like some giant flyswatter.

It wasn’t enough for Harry to simply protect Nevada from nuclear waste. He authored the Energy and Water Appropriates Act of 2009 that provided nearly $200 million to terminate the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project and fund a blue ribbon commission requested by the president to conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing nuclear waste and recommend a new strategy. In 2012, the commission concluded, among other findings, that spent nuclear fuel or other high-level waste should not be forced upon any state, community or tribe without its permission.

Harry Reid has been tirelessly vigilant and successful in protecting Nevada from the risks of housing nuclear waste and in advocating that nobody else should be forced to defend itself from an assault by the nuclear power industry.

There will be a lot written about Harry’s advocacy on behalf of Nevada, and for those efforts he deserves a standing ovation. His actions will resonate for generations. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren will have been kept safe from the threats of nuclear waste. They won’t know who to thank, so on their behalf: Thank you, Harry.

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