Stateside with Rosalea Barker: Nevada

Who is Nevada Bill, and why did he get screwed? Trick question! “Screw Nevada Bill” is the nickname the Silver State’s residents gave to a 1987 Congressional bill that singled out Yucca Mountain, NV, as the sole site the federal government would develop as a repository for the nation’s nuclear waste. According to the Las Vegas Sun’s website on the topic, “The [Department of Energy] expected to open the repository and receive waste in January 1998, but delays have continually pushed the date back. In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the House Joint Resolution 87 which allowed the DOE to start construction on the repository.”

On March 31, 2017, 39 states were to begin sending the nuclear waste from 126 sites around the country to the facility, which is 90 miles from Las Vegas. But the change in House and Senate leadership following the 2006 election meant that Nevada Senator Harry Reid was in a position to effectively kill the project forever, especially now that President Obama has instructed his administration to do just that. At the beginning of March, the DOE filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board to withdraw its application for a license to build Yucca Mountain. The agency filed the motion “with prejudice,” which means it believes the site is unsuitable and that it has no intention to reopen the license application process.

Boy, has that pissed off the states that were hoping to ship their nuclear waste to Nevada! Washington state filed an injunction with an Appeals Court in Washington, DC, to stop DOE killing the project, and a number of other states are doing the same in a joint suit. Among them is South Carolina, whose Governor travelled to DC last week to try to convince officials not to put the kibosh on the storage facility. One irony of South Carolina taking a lead in this, is that the first battle of the Civil War took place at Fort Sumter, SC, on April 12, 1861, and Nevada is also called the “Battle-Born State”.

According to the Nevada legislature’s own website, “Nevada's early statehood was the result of a number of factors pertaining to the politics of the Civil War and President Lincoln's reelection campaign.” It had only become a territory in March 1861, carved out of the Utah Territory following the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1857, but its date of admission to the United States was a mere three years later: October 31, 1864. It was the 36th state. As the Online Nevada Encyclopedia describes it: “An enabling act for Nevada statehood was passed just before the Thirty-eighth Congress was to go into recess, and signed by President Lincoln on March 21, 1864, which set up the procedure for future admission. This enabling act stated that Nevada would achieve statehood when and if it wrote an acceptable constitution, which would include certain stipulated provisions. The constitution would be reviewed by the President, and, if approved, Nevada would be admitted. The procedure was constitutionally odd, in that Congress was left out of it; it was up to the territory and to the President to implement the required ideas.”

People all over the world are familiar with Nevada and the mining boomtown of Virginia City because of one of TV’s longest-running shows: Bonanza. Virginia City celebrated its sesqui in 2009, but it holds lots of celebrations and events every year, including international camel racing and outhouse races. Not to mention the annual Mountain Oyster Festival, aka the Testicle Festival. Given Senator Harry Reid’s current low showing in the polls for this year’s Senate race, perhaps he should start wearing a codpiece lest his own end up on a plate. Speaking of fossils, the state has some of the most complete skeletons of ichthyosaurs in the world. The giant marine mammals lived in the sea that covered what is now the Nevada desert between 250 and 90 million years ago.

If you’re interested in the article I wrote about a trip to Carson City, the capital of Nevada, back in March 2001, you can read it here.

--PEACE—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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