John Boehner, Tuesday in Cleveland, giving Harry Reid a political gift by calling for the reopening of Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the nation's dumping ground for nuclear waste:
QUESTION: The only repository for nuclear waste planned or conceived or developed for this country is Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and it is stopped dead in its tracks by Harry Reid. If the Republicans can take back Congress, what position would the party take on opening Yucca Mountain so our nuclear reactors have someplace to put their waste?
BOEHNER: Most Republicans have supported Yucca Mountain for the twenty years that I've been here and the American people would be shocked to know how much nuclear waste is laying just miles from their home. It's laying at every nuclear plant in the country and why? Because we can't get Yucca Mountain finished because it's not politically correct. We've invested tens of billions of dollars in a storage facility that's as safe as anything we're going to find.
Why is that a gift to Harry Reid? For three reasons:
- Yucca Mountain is incredibly unpopular in Nevada -- nobody in Nevada wants the Silver State to become the nation's dumping ground for nuclear waste.
- Harry Reid is the number one reason why Yucca Mountain has been effectively closed (though a recent court ruling has given it a weak pulse).
- Sharron Angle opposes Reid's position -- and supports Boehner's plan to reopen Yucca. That's right, she believes Nevada should become the nation's nuclear waste dumping ground.
In the absence of GOP support for dumping nuclear waste in Nevada, Angle's support for Yucca might be dismissed as a quirky but irrelevant detail, but Boehner's comments renews the relevance of her position. Thanks largely to Harry Reid and a unified opposition from Nevada lawmakers, the plan has been all but defeated, but if Sharron Angle were elected to the U.S. Senate advocates for dumping waste in Nevada would have an important ally -- and would probably end up getting their way.