By ED VOGEL -- Ely Times Capital Bureau
CARSON CITY -- Assemblyman Lloyd Mann introduced a resolution on Feb. 26, 1975, that said Nevada would welcome the creation of a nuclear waste repository at the Nevada Test Site.
Both houses of the Legislature overwhelmingly approved the resolution within weeks. They said the "people of Southern Nevada have confidence in the safety record" of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Within a few years, residents began hearing about studies at Yucca Mountain, an ugly razorback a few miles north of Lathrop Wells, now called Amargosa Valley.
On Tuesday, Nevada was awarded what its legislators and many of its residents wanted back in 1975, although most of them now view things nuclear much differently. The U.S. Senate overturned Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto of Yucca Mountain as the nation's high-level nuclear waste repository.
"It was the biggest political mistake of my life," remembered former U.S. Sen. and Gov. Richard Bryan about the vote he made a generation ago.
As a legislator, Bryan supported the repository resolution. He said those votes came when Nevadans, out of a sense of patriotism, would support just about anything nuclear as long as it brought well-paying jobs to the state.
During the 1950s, many Nevada schoolchildren rose at dawn to watch the flash of atomic tests. Almost everybody in Las Vegas had a relative or friend who worked at the Nevada Test Site.
"When the nuclear age came to Nevada, it was embraced enthusiastically," said Bryan, a Democrat. "Ninety-nine point nine percent of us never thought about nuclear waste or knew it existed. We just knew the bomb brought an end to the war."
Not long after the passage of the pro-nuclear resolution, 11 spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor in Florida were hauled to the Nevada Test Site and placed within the bowels of a mine.
There were no protests to this early demonstration of the storage of nuclear waste. Test site officials regularly bused members of the media and local leaders to the mine to show how safely nuclear waste could be stored.
"We were very naive in the early days," said Bob Loux, administrator of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects. "We thought the selection would be a fair process."
The son of a career Energy Department worker, Loux took a job with the state in 1979 to monitor federal activities in selecting the nuclear repository.
"I knew most of the guys at the DOE in the early days," he said.
As Loux became Nevada's point man on Yucca Mountain, the views of average Nevadans about the nuclear age began to change.
First, there was a spate of lawsuits filed by former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall in 1979 on behalf of downwinders, people who lived downwind of the test site during the days of atmospheric testing.
Test site workers started to complain of illnesses and asked Congress to help. A cancer cluster was reported in St. George, Utah. Thyroid problems cropped up in younger people who had been brought up on milk produced by cows downwind of the test site. The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster was blared over newscasts in 1979.
Bringing the horror to celluloid reality was the 1979 release of the movie "The China Syndrome," spawning concern of a reactor meltdown in those pre-Chernobyl days.
"All of a sudden, we saw nuclear as something exceedingly dangerous," Bryan said. "There was a shattering of innocence. People became less trusting of government. That may be the legacy of Vietnam."
"The noose was around our neck from the start," added Bob Fulkerson, who as the leader of Citizen Alert organized the first protests against the Yucca Mountain Project. "Nevada had a gung-ho, all-for-our-country, pro-military position in the '70s and '80s. We begged the government not to shut down nuclear weapons testing, and the same time we said we didn't want nuclear wastes."
During that era, the federal government looked at different rock and salt formations across the country in its quest to find a place to dispose of wastes piling up in cooling ponds outside the nation's more than 100 nuclear power plants.
Quickly identified as leading contenders for a repository were the basalt formations at the government's Hanford, Wash., Nuclear Reservation, the volcanic tuff at the Nevada Test Site and salt formations in Deaf Smith County, Texas. Sites in Utah, Mississippi, Louisiana and New York also were checked.
Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act on Dec. 22, 1982. President Reagan signed the bill into law two weeks later. That act called for the Energy Department to construct two repositories, one in the East, the other in the West, opening the first by 1998.
Five sites initially would be studied for each repository. Three would be selected by 1985 for detailed study.
Within six months of Reagan's signing, news reports circulated that then-unknown Yucca Mountain was the leading contender for the repository. Bill Vasconi, the Southern Nevada chairman of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Study Committee, said it was not a coincidence that Yucca Mountain was ranked so high.
"The test site has been one of the of the most-studied geological sites in the country," said Vasconi, whose group favors the Yucca Mountain site and wants the state to negotiate for compensation in exchange for accepting the repository. "We detonated 928 nuclear devices at the site. We were doing it for our country. All for our country ... should still mean something. Yucca Mountain was chosen because we already had a nuclear facility there."
On Dec. 19, 1984, the Energy Department selected Yucca Mountain as one of three finalists for the first repository. In a Las Vegas news conference, officials touted the economic benefits: 8,500 workers would be needed during site construction.
About that time, Loux compared notes with his colleagues in other states being considered for the repository. He found the studies there were perfunctory.
"They'd say, `Nevada, you're it,' " he remembered. "We had assumed it would be a fair selection, but it was becoming painfully obvious it was a political process."
Regardless of the law, Energy Secretary Donald Hodel announced in 1986 there would be no studies for a second repository. He also said if Texas didn't want the repository in Deaf Smith County, near Amarillo, then it would not be built there.
By then, Bryan and members of the Nevada congressional delegation were crying foul. Their protests fell on deaf ears.
A year later, Congress put into law what Hodel had proposed. On Dec. 17, 1987, a House-Senate negotiating team reworked the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and made Yucca Mountain the only candidate for a high-level nuclear repository.
No Nevadans were on the negotiating team. All four members of the Nevada delegation said the decision was pure politics. Deaf Smith County was dropped because of the influence of House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, and Hanford was rejected because of the clout of Majority Leader Tom Foley of Washington.
Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., who drew up the bill, boasted: "We got a site and we will be able to put nuclear waste there safely.
"Nevadans are not particularly happy about it, but they've known for some time they would be picked," Johnston added. "I would bet anything after it is built they would deem it one of their treasures."
Five days later, as part of an Omnibus Reconciliation Act, the Yucca Mountain amendments were approved by Congress. The legislation became known in the Silver State as the "Screw Nevada Bill," and Johnston become a persona non grata in Nevada.
"What is proposed is an act of naked and unprovoked aggression by the people of several states against a state which is smaller and has less power, the state of Nevada," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Then in his first year as a senator, Reid called himself a pessimist and predicted "Nevada won't be able to stop the dump."
Nevada's political leaders consider that law purely political, but Steve Kraft of the Nuclear Energy Institute said the decision was made on science.
"The fact was there was a record before each member of Congress that said Yucca Mountain was ranked Number One," Kraft said. "During the floor debate in the Senate a month before, they argued about costs."
Kraft said lawmakers initially thought studies to find a suitable repository would cost $60 million. But by 1987, the estimates of studying a single site reached $1.2 billion. As of today, $4 billion has been spent at Yucca Mountain, with $7 billion on the program overall, and costs may reach $60 billion before a repository actually opens, he said.
Shortly after the 1987 vote, Reid blamed the decision to study only Yucca Mountain on former Sen. Paul Laxalt, R-Nev., saying Laxalt did "zip" as a senator to keep it out of Nevada.
Laxalt retaliated by saying, "Harry blew it, and everybody in Washington knows it." Laxalt said Democrats had cut the "nasty deal" that essentially brought the dump to Nevada. The legislation later was signed by Laxalt's best friend, President Reagan.
If blame is handed out after today's vote, Loux could point his finger at members of both political parties.
He remembers one-term Sen. Chic Hecht, R-Nev., infamous for calling Yucca Mountain a "nuclear suppository," beat him up as a witness when Loux journeyed to Washington to testify on Yucca Mountain. Loux said mixed signals were sent by the delegation about Nevada's views on Yucca Mountain.
"At the national level, the Democrats put the screws to us," said Loux, pointing to Johnston and Rep. John Dingle of Michigan.
Outside the Washington beltway, Loux said, the real culprit is the nuclear power industry, which pulled the strings of politicians who acted on not-in-my-back-yard principles. The nuclear power industry provided the contributions for politicians who did not want a dump in their states, he said.
Reno political consultant Andy Barbano says one can go back to President Eisenhower and his "Atoms for Peace" program of the 1950s to find blame.
Under Eisenhower, the nation began looking for peaceful uses of atomic energy and started building nuclear power plants. No consideration was given then to waste disposal.
"Nuclear power plants were developed as part of the program to justify spending on nuclear weapons," he said. "Blame the military industrial complex."