Ben Wolfgang reports that the retirement of Sen. Harry Reid may give new life to a project he has made a career out of opposing. For years, the Senate minority leader and Nevada Democrat has been the most vocal opponent of a plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, a remote site about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Analysts say Mr. Reid staunch political opposition to the proposal partly led to the Obama administration to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain in 2011. But the incoming Trump administration reportedly wants to give the site another look, and they will no longer have to deal with the politically powerful Mr. Reid, who has served in the Senate since 1987 and been his party leader in the chamber since 2005.
Even die-hard opponents of the Yucca Mountain proposal concede that the debate around the facility had become almost entirely about Mr. Reid and his heavy-handed opposition, creating a narrative that he was the sole reason the project never came to fruition. The great irony here is that because Sen. Reid has been so successful in using his knowledge of the Senate rules, procedures, and powers to hobble the Department of Energy program, there are lots of people who have come to the reasonable conclusion that the problem with Yucca Mountain is Harry Reid, said Robert Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. But even with the Reid departure, he continued, there are still significant roadblocks. none technical, all political.
The project, originally approved by Congress in 2002, was scrapped by the Obama administration in 2011. That decision came despite years of research and billions of dollars allocated to the proposal. Soon after the White House seemingly killed Yucca, the Government Accountability Office slammed the move as purely political, and there has long been speculation that the Reid political maneuvering was the main reason the project was halted.
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