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by Dennis Myers, Reno News Review
published 3.11.2010

Pacific Northwest activist Gerry Pollet could not believe his eyes.

Pollet, who monitors the cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the Columbia River in Washington and has sometimes made common cause with Nevada anti-Yucca Mountain dump activists, found a Las Vegas Review-Journal story on the web about Nevada candidates calling for bringing waste to Yucca Mountain just as the state seemed on the verge of winning its long running battle against the dump there.

“Several Republican candidates—including leading U.S. Senate candidates Danny Tarkanian, Sue Lowden and Sharron Angle—have expressed support for studying or experimenting with reprocessing, a method of extracting useful fuel from radioactive waste,” the newspaper reported. “Two Republican gubernatorial candidates are also open to the idea, despite steadfast opposition from the Nevada political establishment that stymied the plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain.”

For a quarter of a century, Nevada has been fighting to keep the mountain in Nye County from becoming a dump for high level wastes, mainly from power plants.

“I wouldn’t have predicted that statewide candidates in Nevada would be calling for sending the same high-level waste to Yucca Mountain that the state just defeated,” Pollet said. “That’s the danger of candidates or incumbents listening to industry or political ideologues from outside Nevada.”

Is it the same waste? Pollet says the end goal—reprocessing instead of storage—may be different, but the waste that would be brought to Nevada is exactly the same stuff Nevada has been trying to keep out.

“It really is the very same high-level nuclear waste!” he said in an email message. “The reprocessing proposal is to reprocess the fuel rods from reactors, melting them down to extract Pu [plutonium] and U [uranium], rather than simply burying the fuel rods in a deep geologic repository.”

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tarkanian has the most clearly spelled-out view on bringing nuclear waste to Nevada.

“Reprocessing plants have been utilized all around the world and have excellent safety track records,” he wrote in a position paper on his website. “Yet I find it bizarre that, as one of the leading nuclear energy producers in the world, the U.S. does not have a single reprocessing site. The [Nye County] location is ideal and the transition process could be started easily, the result being a new industry that Nevada can take a lead in. Turning Yucca Mountain into a nuclear reprocessing facility will create thousands of jobs for Nevadans, generate hundreds of millions of dollars of much needed revenue for the State, and turn UNLV and Nevada into the leading research institutions in this field in the world.”

Tarkanian’s position paper, posted on his own site, was later picked up and posted on the Carbon Capture Report, a nuclear power industry site. Keep reading the entire article.