Nevada's Clout in the Primaries Puts the Spotlight on Nuclear Politics

Meet Yucca Mountain Johnny: nice enough guy, cave explorer and not welcome in the state of Nevada. He's the helmeted cartoon character invented by the U.S. Department of Energy to interest kids in its $58 billion vision for Nevada, which could become by 2017 the first-ever national resting place for 77,000 tons of waste left by nuclear reactors across America. The debris would be shipped cross-country, mainly by rail, and entombed in the depths of a seven-mile desert ridge an hour and a half's drive from Las Vegas.

But any spent fuel rods will go in there over the dead bodies of powerful Silver State politicians from both parties. For years here, careers have risen on promises to stick a wrench in the Yucca plan. Even the gaffes have. A notorious remark by 1980s Sen. Chic Hecht, R-Nev., found him vowing to halt "nuclear suppositories" in Nevada, when he meant "depositories." That's the preferred term by defenders who emphasize that Yucca wouldn't be a "dump," as critics have called it, but a 1,000-foot-deep zone to deposit titanium-shielded casks buried under dry volcanic rock. But many Nevadans fear that radiation could leak in an accident, either here in the desert or on the way.

"Democrat candidates generally have to come in and say they oppose Yucca," says University of Nevada political science professor Eric Herzik, "or will be beat up in the caucuses by the very strong anti-Yucca base among Democrats in the state."

And on the Republican side, only former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney has hinted that he might defer to Nevadans on Yucca. But among the three Democratic front runners of 2008, no friend of Yucca Mountain Johnny's is to be found -- even if two of the candidates support nuclear power and, in Obama's case, has major ties to Big Atom.

If Clinton, Edwards and Obama are paying more attention than usual to the concerns of Nevada, which barely mattered in 2000, it's because the state's concerns are being magnified by the special place it now occupies on the Democratic Party's 2008 primary calendar. It used to be that about 14 states voted before Nevada in the primaries. This time, its Jan. 19 caucus -- right after Iowa's -- makes it the No. 2 stop on the road to nomination.

That means candidates will be trying to impress the Las Vegas Strip's powerful labor union of restaurant, casino and hotel workers, the 60,000-strong Culinary Union Local 226 whose leader, D. Taylor, won congratulatory letters from Obama and Hillary after his employees voted this month for a strike against the gaming giant MGM Mirage. The two candidates are hoping Taylor's 226 doesn't follow the example of the state's unions of carpenters, steelworkers and miners by choosing Edwards instead of them.

To avoid losing her edge in Nevada -- where she's led a recent poll with 33 percent support over Obama's 19 and Edwards's 15 -- Hillary Clinton took steps earlier this year to shore up her record of opposition to Yucca. Competitors Barack Obama and John Edwards followed suit.

Hillary Clinton, of the three, "has most obviously played the Yucca politics card," says Herzig. She has promised that, if elected, she would ensure that Yucca, which the White House supports, "would not go forward."

This July, Clinton and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., called for Senate hearings on the science of Yucca. (A Senate aide told AlterNet that the hearings are expected some time this fall.) Earlier, on June 1, her campaign revealed it had hired the state's leading anti-Yucca activist: Peggy Maze Johnson, who, as the leader of the environmentalist group Citizens Alert, protested by driving the highways towing a mock nuclear waste trailer.

Any Democrat who wanted to support Yucca would have to deal with Harry Reid, the party's Senate Majority Leader and the responsible party for the early caucus date. He was calling Bush a liar over Yucca long before he opposed him on Iraq. "I have spent 20 years fighting the absurd idea that massive quantities of deadly nuclear waste can be transported across thousands of miles," Reid has said. And Bush, he told the New Yorker, "started out on a real bad foot with me because of Yucca Mountain."