Word: yucca
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...YUCCA MOUNTAIN...
...view from the top of Yucca Mountain in Nevada sweeps down past hillsides tangled with creosote bush to the rocky, sun-baked desert floor, with Las Vegas about 90 miles to the southeast. The proximity to that city is a problem for Nevadans--and perhaps for the future of nuclear power in this country--because the Federal Government wants to bury inside Yucca Mountain the most toxic garbage that humankind has produced: 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste generated by America's 103 nuclear power plants. A thousand feet below the mountain's peak, a tunneling machine called...
...Administration from putting the nuclear dump in his state. "This is wrong what they're trying to do," insists Reid. Last May, majority leader Tom Daschle flew to Las Vegas to speak at a fund raiser for Reid. "As long as we're in the majority," Daschle vowed, "[the Yucca Mountain project] is dead...
...they make good on the threat? Federal bureaucrats doubt it. "It doesn't matter what Harry Reid says," says Jerry King, the project manager of the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain feasibility study. "We are going ahead full speed." By the end of this year, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham will probably recommend to President Bush that nuclear waste be buried at the repository. Bush's energy plan calls for construction of new nuclear power plants (the technology now supplies about 20% of the nation's electricity), but that won't happen unless the industry finds a place to store...
...prevent the resolution from coming to a vote, but they can mobilize Democrats and can expect help from such G.O.P. dissenters as John Ensign, Nevada's other Senator, who has warned the White House that it will lose his vote on the energy plan if nuclear waste goes to Yucca. Bush is paying attention--he doesn't have Republican votes to spare...