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Kill Yucca, then get going on the rest of our problems

Kill Yucca, then get going on the rest of our problemsBy Brian Greenspun Las Vegas Sun, Feb 22, 2009 (2 a.m.)President Barack Obama says the Yucca Mountain project is dead.Nevada’s senior U.S. senator, Majority Leader Harry Reid, says the high-level nuclear waste dump is dead.

The nation’s nuclear power players — the folks who want to bury their problems in our back yard — aren’t saying it is dead, but they are acting as if it is in a coma and on its last legs.

And the majority of voters in Nevada — the people who put their trust in the president’s promise to kill their worst nightmare and helped elect him in November — believe the nation’s proposed high-level waste dump won’t happen.

So, given all that, why are Gov. Jim Gibbons and his champion, Nevada GOP Chairman Sue Lowden, doing all they can to breathe life into the moribund dump, thereby threatening countless thousands of Nevadans, their kids and those not yet born?……………………. the people of Nevada say they oppose the dump but remain oblivious to the subterfuge and incompetence that surround them.

What does all that mean? It means Yucca is not dead. Not even close. As long as we tolerate our own politicians sending mixed signals at best and clear signals of capitulation at worst, we will get that dump.

We are in the second generation of Nevadans fighting against the Goliath of the federal government and its multibillion-dollar friends in the power companies who care not about us but only about the almighty dollars they can make by turning us into a glowing, radiating, deadly dump. We are closer to winning than we have ever been. Now is not the time to let the little minds among us prevail.

Now is the time to do something. What we should not do, though, is tolerate for one moment longer those among us who would sell us out.

Kill Yucca, then get going on the rest of our problems – Las Vegas Sun

February 23, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA