Posted on 08/11/2004 5:33:30 AM PDT by OESY
LAS VEGAS, Aug. 10 - Seizing on an issue that this state's Democratic senator calls "the most important to the people of Nevada," Senator John Kerry vowed Tuesday not to send nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain and accused President Bush of breaking a similar promise he made four years ago.
In a state that Mr. Bush won by four percentage points in 2000, Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, hammered at the administration's support for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"Yucca Mountain to me is a symbol of the recklessness and arrogance with which they are willing to proceed with respect to the safety issues and concerns of the American people," Mr. Kerry said of the administration.
"This is not just a Nevada issue; this is not just about Yucca Mountain," he told a small crowd of invited guests at a middle school here. "This is about America. This is about a relationship between the people who lead and the people, you, the governed. It's about promises kept and promises broken."
In 2000, Mr. Bush followed his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, in promising to veto plans to store high-level nuclear waste at the mountain, saying in late September that he would not send waste to any site unless it was proved safe scientifically. Once in office, amid scientific debate over safety, Mr. Bush accepted an Energy Department recommendation to approve the storage site.
Showing its own awareness of the issue's importance in the state, the Bush campaign circulated memorandums on Tuesday scouring Mr. Kerry's Senate record to show six instances over a decade in which he cast votes that could be construed as supporting storage at Yucca Mountain. Republicans also noted that Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, backed storage at the Nevada site before joining the ticket.
"The Kerry-Edwards ticket was for Yucca Mountain before they were against it, and Nevadans should not be fooled by election-year pandering," Nevada's Republican senator, John Ensign, said in a statement circulated by the Bush campaign.
But Mr. Ensign himself, when pressed on a cable television program last week, said of Mr. Kerry that "on this one issue he's been better than George Bush, but that's on one issue." And campaigning alongside Mr. Kerry on Tuesday was Mr. Ensign's Democratic counterpart, Senator Harry Reid, who dismissed the votes cited by the Republicans, saying, "John Kerry has been with us every time we've needed him. ''
The daylong focus on the storage plan, which is currently stalled in the courts, signals the power to frame the political fight of swing states like Nevada, whose swelling population has increased its value to five electoral votes, from four.
At an evening rally that drew more than 10,000 people to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas basektball arena, Mr. Kerry declared firmly, "When I'm President of the United States, I'll tell you about Yucca Mountain: Not on my watch! No!" To loud cheers, he added with a flourish that if Congress tried to change environmental standards to overcome legal obstacles, "Veto pen, gone, out!"
Several recent polls here have shown the race in the state to be in a virtual dead heat. In 2000, polls showed that Mr. Gore overtook Mr. Bush in Nevada after opposing Yucca Mountain and then lost the edge when Mr. Bush echoed the opposition.
The debate over Yucca Mountain stretches back two decades, and has captured attention in part because some 100,000 shipments of waste would have to be trucked across 44 states to get to the facility, in some cases skirting homes and schools. Congress picked Yucca as a national repository for high-level waste in 1987, but a federal court this summer dealt the plan a major setback, saying it could not proceed because the government lacked standards to prevent leaks after 10,000 years.
Mr. Kerry and Mr. Reid said that instead of storing waste at Yucca they would keep it at the nation's 100-plus nuclear reactors. Mr. Kerry also invoked the legacy of Roosevelt and Truman's leadership supporting the invention of the atomic bomb, saying, "what we need now is the reverse of that: we need a Manhattan Project that learns how to tame the negative consequences of that power of the atom."
In a 45-minute give-and-take in which he uncharacteristically read from notes, fumbling somewhat with statistics and quotations from government studies, Mr. Kerry sought to broaden the seemingly parochial issue into a symbol of differences between himself and Mr. Bush on the environment and science, two mainstays of his campaign.
"The United States of America deserves a president of the United States who believes in science," he said. "It's not just the science of Yucca Mountain, it's the science of global warming. It's the science of stem cell research and the possibilities of the future; it's the science of clean air and clean water."
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Tuesday that Mr. Bush had based his decision on Yucca mountain on "sound science," as he had promised to do in 2000.
Asked about Mr. Edwards's support for storage at Yucca Mountain, Mr. Reid said Mr. Edwards had called him after being tapped by Mr. Kerry and said he was now "on the Yucca Mountain bandwagon."
Mark Kornblau, Mr. Edwards's spokesman said: "John Kerry has very clearly stated that his administration will oppose the storage of dangerous nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and John Edwards is very comfortable with that policy."
If Kerry is serious about global warming, he'd know that the best solution is to build a lot more nuclear power plants. But I don't think he's serious about the issue.
This boob will say ANYTHING to get a vote..
Open storage on MA is an alternative. ;~)
ANother redeeming message from Jf'nCury.
No Mr. Kerry, YOU are the symbol of recklessness and arrogance.
I'd like to see it dumped in Massachusetts, around his home.
He'll get votes in Nevada with this one. It's a hot issue. (No pun intended). I'd love to know what his alternative is.
This will be yet another Flip-Flop for Mr. Kerry. I'm off to work, but hopefully someone will post all the bills he voted in favor of this and would not help to stop it.
Out of sight, out of mind. No, Yucca mountain is not an ideal repository (I did a paper on this). But it's the best one that we have and we're not likely to find others unless we can achieve interplanetary travel and dump it in Venus. Meanwhile the Democrats want to defund NASA -plus- they would be content to let it sit for all eternity in some basement. Sigh...
kerry promised not to send it there after he promised he would.
As far as I know there is no suitable alternative anywhere in the USA... none, zilch, zip.
I doubt this will flip Nevada over to Kerry... IIRC, this issue existed before 2000.
Mr Kerry reliably voted against this before he voted for it.
Go here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1189167/posts
Kerry thinks it's much safer to keep nuclear waste in outdoor pools that in which a bezerk Islamist on an aircraft can immolate himslef in and contaminate a wide area.
Great idea! Does Kerry's house have a basement????
Since you're obviously up to snuff on this, do you know how much money has been spent to analyze and prepare this site for long-range storage?
Yes it is Senator.
Its about promises that the Federal Government to nuclear power plant operators.
Its about a promise to build them a permanent repository.
Its about a promise made to those nuclear power plants that have pre-paid billions of dollars to the Federal government to construct a storage facility.
Its about a guarantee that those nuclear power plants will sue the government for many billions of dollars for breach of contract.
Its about a promise to keep Americans safe from terrorists. Distributing nuclear waste in hundreds of sheet metal buildings around the country is not safe, Senator.
Perhaps the Yucca site will not last 10,000 years. Perhaps it will. But I do know that Islam will not last 10,000 years and Yucca is a great place to keep this hazardous stuff until Islam burns itself out.
Storage is not the only issue plaguing nuclear power plants
Deregulation changed the nuclear power equation for good. "In this new competitive generation market, investors don't have any guarantees that the construction costs will ever be recouped," explains Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute... "No matter how many subsidies we throw at this technology, we're not going to tempt many investors to build nuclear power plants when cheaper alternatives are in front of them." ...But as a strict free-marketeer, he thinks conservatives have "a soft spot in their heads" when it comes to nukes. "If nuclear power can pay for itself over time, then it doesn't need any government help, welfare, subsidy, or anything else," he says. "It seems clear to me that were it not for large and historically important federal subsidies, there wouldn't be a single nuclear power plant in the United States."
It is estimated that new plant construction would have to be subsidized by the federal government at a 50% rate. We're talking BILLIONS.
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