Starting the Debate on Yucca Mountain

Huh?  What do you mean?  The repository has been killed by Harry Reid and, goodness, we went over this for years and came to the conclusion that every last, single Nevadan was absolutely opposed and thus the issue is now dead – isn’t that the case?  Not quite – Chuck Muth points out a salient fact over at Nevada News and Views:

…The newspaper editorial concludes with this: “Nevada’s Republican Party should repudiate anyone who supports a Yucca dump. It’s not the will of the voters, and it’s not in the best interest of the state.”

Whether Yucca is in the best interest of the state or not is an editorial opinion, not a fact. We don’t know what potential offsetting benefits there might be for Nevada since we’ve never been allowed to discuss them.

As for the claim that Yucca isn’t “the will of the voters,” how do we know? Biased and misleading polls offering incomplete choices?…

That is pretty much it – I’ve lived in Nevada for 15 years now and I don’t remember there ever being a debate on the merits of Yucca Mountain.  I remember a lot of environmentalist scare stories (and how often have such stories proven false when actually look in to?  Oh, yeah; every single time!); I recall politicians doing a bit of political kabuki theater about how they are more anti-Yucca than thou vis a vis their opponents; but I don’t remember, we, the people, ever voting on it.

Muth goes on to note that we should have an advisory vote of the people were we essentially ask them to decide – keep to a rigid, never negotiate attitude towards Yucca, or are you willing to discuss proposals for various site usages, with the final decision to be left to referendum at a later date?  That, to me, is the best way to determine policy on this.  Me, personally, I’d open the site for nuclear waste as long as we can hold the rest of the country up for ransom for storing their waste.  I figure we could probably rake in a couple billion a year for that – enough to greatly reduce our tax burden while at the same time providing high funding for education, health care, fire and police.

Trouble is, we can’t even ask about it.  As Muth’s quote of the newspaper article indicates, we’re all supposed to be uniformly opposed and never consider options.  We should ask about it – and we should try to find some political leaders with enough guts to buck the Ruling Class…which essentially manufactured opposition to Yucca and then kept it up for decades until the happy circumstance of a Nevada Senator becoming Majority Leader allowed it to be killed.  Here’s hoping we can find such a person.

Read more at Noonan for Nevada