Argument For Yucca Mountain

From the Pahrump Valley Times: As of July 2012, Nevada has the highest unemployment rate in the nation. At 12 percent, it is more than a percentage point above the next highest, Rhode Island, at 10.8 percent. Coming in at 3 percent, North Dakota has the lowest rate, due in part to its energy boom. Sadly, Nevada also has among the lowest-rated schools in the nation — dead last by some measures, behind even Mississippi, the perennial contender for that dubious honor.
How did this happen? How did Nevada get itself into an economic and educational hole that will not be easy to climb out of?
In some significant measure, I believe it is due to poor leadership; notably, that of former Gov. Richard Bryan and current U.S. Sen. Harry Reid.
If these two gentlemen, among others, had played their cards wisely over the last 30 years, Nevada, at a bare minimum, would be the home of a world-class, multi-billion-dollar nuclear/medical research facility employing, according to former U.S. Energy Department Secretary Paul Herrington (under President Ronald Reagan), more Nobel Prize winners than any institution on earth. The Reagan Administration made this offer to Nevada in the mid-1980s if the state would accept the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository.
Moreover, if Nevada’s leaders had played it smart, the state might now also be the home of the multi-billion-dollar superconductor/supercollider, along with a super train between Las Vegas and Los Angeles (not Victorville), that were offered in exchange for acceptance of Yucca Mountain.
As it turned out, a less-energetic version of the big supercollider ended up being built in Europe and the Swiss and French are getting all the wealth and scientific prestige Nevada could have had. Pitifully, the super train is now a pipe dream.
These high-tech enterprises, especially the medical research facility and superconductor/supercollider, would have catapulted Nevada almost overnight to world-class status in high technology research and development. Moreover, they would have attracted other leading-edge technology endeavors to Nevada. Yucca Mountain would have seeded advanced research and development into nuclear power, such as transmutation of nuclear waste and new types of reactors. (See Llewellyn King’s column in the Las Vegas Sun, September 15, 2012, for more on new reactors.)
Up to now, Harry Reid and Richard Bryan have been like the Roman Horatio (Horatius) at the Tiber River bridge in the year 510, holding back the horde — in this case, the horde of twenty-first century technology.
They seem to have been saying, in effect, “Somebody’s going to prosper with spent nuclear fuel, but it ain’t gonna be Nevada.” These “No Can Do” twins are but pale reflections of our “can-do” Nye County forbearers such as Joseph and Margaret Yount, Elmer Bowman and his family in Pahrump, Jim and Belle Butler of Tonopah, and James and Martha Gally of Tybo/Hot Creek.
But that’s history. Where are we now? It could be the No-Can-Do’ers have about played out their hand. To hear Yucca Mountain opponents talk, you’d think Yucca Mountain is dead or nearly so. But there is good evidence to suggest otherwise.  http://pvtimes.com/news/yucca-mountain-another-chance/
When Yucca was first proposed, the U.S. government promised the moon and stars to Nevada for us to take the nuclear fuel but Nevada said no and so it was forced on us.
Then, when Yucca was opened, it employed thousands upon thousands of highly paid professionals and Harry Reid and President Obama threw them out to the street to please the environmentalists and the sky is falling crowd.
Hopefully, when Reid (The Bad Mormon) leaves office in January or so and Obama is defeated, common sense will prevail and Yucca will be reopened, thousands of people employed and the technology increases and we can start safely collecting nuclear waste from different nuclear power plants.