Experts: Reid's Senate position helps poise Yucca Mountain fight

RENO (AP) - Sen. Harry Reid's rise to power in the Democratic-controlled Congress will give a big boost to efforts to halt a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, experts agree.

The state also will benefit if Sen. John Ensign becomes head of the Republican campaign arm in the Senate as expected, they say.

Reid, Ensign and other top Nevada elected officials have been fighting the Bush administration's attempts to get the stalled nuclear waste repository back on track.

Bush wants to ship the nation's nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, about 110 miles north of Las Vegas.

Republican Jim Denton, a veteran campaign consultant from Henderson, said Reid's Senate leadership can't help but bolster the fight against Yucca Mountain.

"Absolutely, that's big for Nevada. Yucca Mountain will go nowhere because of him," Denton said.

"Reid is Senate majority leader. Ensign will move up. I don't know how Nevada could be in a better position from a national perspective, I just don't," Denton added.

Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of the Nevada environmental group Citizen Alert, said Reid - as Senate minority leader - has been effective in keeping budget requests low enough to slow the Department of Energy's plans at Yucca Mountain.

"As majority leader we are confident Senator Reid can stop Yucca Mountain in its tracks," Johnson said. "We can't begin to tell you how positive this is for the final nail in the coffin for Yucca Mountain."

DOE spokesman Craig Stevens said Sunday the Bush administration was moving ahead with plans to submit by mid-2008 a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and open the repository, with a goal of opening it by 2017.

"It was voted on by both houses of Congress in 2002, and it's currently the law of the land that a repository be built at Yucca Mountain," Stevens said.

"It's the most studied piece of real estate in the world. The national experts agree it's a safe place for spent nuclear fuel," he said.

If the U.S. is to keep up with increased demands for electricity and maintain a healthy economy, Stevens added, it will need to develop nuclear energy.

"To develop it, we need space to store nuclear fuel and Yucca Mountain is that place," he said.

But John J. Pitney Jr., a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., and a former Republican strategist, said the new Congress will be more friendly to Reid causes.

"For the next Congress, one of the watchwords will be, 'Don't mess with Nevada,"' Pitney told the Las Vegas Sun. "It'd be very difficult to do anything to Nevada that Harry Reid doesn't want done."

Reid, after the election, pledged to push legislation requiring that nuclear waste be stored on-site where it's produced.

Johnson said her group would continue trying to drum up opposition to Yucca Mountain by stressing the dangers of transporting nuclear waste.

"There are still a lot of Democrats, now in the majority, that need to be convinced, so we will need to get our allies across this country mobilized to convince their senators and representatives that this is not only a foolhardy but a very dangerous proposition," Johnson said.