I like Harry Reid. That may surprise some of my colleagues and friends given my background in Republican politics, but Reid, deep down, is a genuinely nice guy from Searchlight, Nevada. Reid’s dad was a miner in the early part of the century and when the Senate Majority Leader says he came from nothing, he’s not kidding. Searchlight back in the first half of the 20th century was about as rough and tough as boom towns got in those days – bordellos, rigged card games, you name it. The dangerous mines killed a lot of men.
Where Senator Reid and I part ways is his stubborn persecution of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. For someone with Reid’s knowledge of Nevada and Nevadans, it amazes me that he has continually worked against developing the one site in the United States where nuclear waste could be safely stored. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time myself in Nevada, and I can personally vouch that Nevadans, with 84% of their state owned and controlled by the Federal Government, couldn’t give two cents about what goes on around Yucca Mountain. There’s nothing out there. Several thousand miles to the East however, live the liberal elite who do have a problem with Yucca Mountain and of course with Nuclear Energy as a whole. Several hundred miles to the West of Yucca is the ocean side colony of Malibu, whose Hollywood-style intelligentsia have got their hooks as deep as they can into Senator Reid via campaign contributions to his races and to the races of fellow anti-nuke politicians. But closer to Yucca, are thousands of Nevadans who could benefit with higher paying, higher skilled jobs if construction and operation of the project moved forward. You don’t have to take my word on that last sentence – The University of Nevada Las Vegas has said as much in an exhaustive study of the economic development benefits the repository would create and sustain.
Millions of words have been written about Yucca Mountain since Mayer Jacob "Chic" Hecht, Nevada’s junior Senator from 1982 to 1988 (In ’82, he had upset political powerhouse Howard Cannon with Ronald Reagan’s help) referred to the Yucca Mountain project as a “nuclear suppository”. Things only got worse from there, with dozens of fringe, out of state groups organizing against the project. The repository, a political “hot” potato (sorry, I couldn’t resist) became a running game of keep-away for the next 25 years.
Scientists, academicians, nuke experts, you name it, studied Yucca for its viability as a safe repository – but the sad fact is, many left-leaning scientists and half-baked environmentalists had already made up their minds about Yucca Mountain many years before the idea was even pursued by the Department of Energy. Coming on the heels of the Three Mile Island accident, the nuclear power industry hit a public relations bump they never fully recovered from (note: there have only been three fatalities caused by a reactor accident, occurring in 1961 at an experimental reactor in Idaho – since then, no one has been killed by anything even remotely “nuclear” in this country).
Reid’s obstinacy is so highly contradictory it makes you wonder how he’s been able to get away with his position for so long with Nevadans. Yes, we all want renewable energy, yes, we all want to get out from under the burden of foreign oil – but do we develop a site in which nuclear waste can be safely stored, so as to permit nuclear reactors to produce the “clean” energy they provide? Yikes, even the French realized the benefits of nuclear energy many years ago and have been on a reactor building binge since the 70s. The French may worry about a lot of things, but they don’t worry about foreign oil.
We should all embrace the notion of cheap, reliable and renewable nuclear energy – and at the same time, we should get down on our hands and knees and thank the Almighty that Reid wasn’t in a position of influence in the 40s and 50s when Nevada was the nation’s nuclear weapons testing area. One of the important reasons we won the Cold War was because we were able to out-engineer the Communists when it came to nuclear weapons – and to develop that science and technology, we had to blow up atomic bombs to test their effectiveness and processes. If Reid had his way back then, we would have been behind the eight ball with the Russians. Today, Nevada’s senior Senator is just content with keeping us under the thumb of foreign oil.
Matt Crow joined Reagan Administration in 1987; worked in both Bush 41 and 43 Administrations; plays to a 19 golf handicap and loves to vacation at the beach with his wife and children.
