Debate over Yucca Mountain has pitted Nevadans who feel hoodwinked by the project against a federal government searching for a place to put nuclear waste. For Nevada politicians, denouncing Yucca Mountain has become almost ritualistic. Nevada hasn’t produced a single barrel of nuclear waste on its own accord, they say.

Some point to opposition to Yucca as the classic manifestation of the so-called Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) mentality, where locals acknowledge that undesirable sites must go somewhere but dispute their placement near where they live.

For example, Robert Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said that the process of selecting Nevada to store nuclear waste was “100 percent political.” And the 1987 Congressional bill focusing attention on Yucca as a planned underground repository for nuclear waste is referred to as the ‘Screw Nevada’ bill in the parlance of local civic leaders and journalists.

A major worry for locals about the project is the impact the waste could have on the tourism industry.

“Thirty million people come to Southern Nevada from all over the world every year,” said David Cherry, the press secretary for Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.). “They don’t want to think they are sitting next to the biggest pile of nuclear waste ever conceived.”

Critics of the project were given ammunition when several emails sent between two scientists at the USGS between 1998 and 2000 became public in March 2005. The memos included criticisms of safety standards and one scientist indicated that he might have to fabricate additional date. The scandal has been called ‘Emailgate’ by some local politicians.

Rep. Jon Porter (R-NV) chaired a subcommittee investigation into the emails. His committee concluded that Yucca Mountain was plagued by serious flaws. A Government Accountability Office report requested by Porter spelled out shortcomings in the data underlying the project.

“The whole email scandal all goes back to the science of the project on water infiltration,” said T. J. Crawford, Porter’s communications director. “There have been problems at every level — the science, quality assurance and management.”

“It’s inappropriate for the Department of Eenergy to push forward with a positive, feel-good PR campaign when [Secretary of Energy Samuel] Bodman himself has called the project broken,” he said.

Though no criminal charges will be filed in the case, that does not mean ethical codes of conduct weren’t ignored, said Sharyn Stein, a spokeswoman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

“The falsifying of data at Yucca Mountain is part of a long string of mismanagement and incompetence by the DOE in trying to create the Yucca Mountain site,” she said.

Officials tried to distance the emails from the project by saying they were written by rogue employees.

“The emails were given to the media by us,” said Charlie Germack, a Bechtel spokesman and the lead guide on the Saturday tour. “We gave the information to them. We could have deleted the emails or swept them under the rug, but we brought them forward.”

The project elicits as much passion as any other hot-button issue among voters in the state. Miss Nevada, Crystal Wosik, received death threats in January after she was quoted in the Reno Gazette-Journal as saying that the state should open Yucca Mountain and “take one for the team.”

The state’s leaders have adamantly fought the construction of a repository on their land. No one wants to be remembered as the Congressman who allowed Yucca Mountain to be established on their watch. The state has spent $100 million on lawyers and scientists since 1983 trying to stop the project, according to Loux.

The one exception to the uniform opposition is the small town of Caliente, where the promise of a new railroad has helped garner the mayor’s support.

Reid, for his part, has tried everything in his attempt to cancel the program. As a freshman senator, he set a record for one of the longest filibusters in the history of the Senate in opposition to the project.

For the congressional delegation, the problem is that bigger states are ganging up on Nevada. Politicians in states where the nuclear waste gets produced face political pressure from their own constituents to move it someplace else. Still, safe transportation of this waste from current storage sites to Yucca presents a plethora of logistical challenges and, for some, raises safety issues. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) tried to use these concerns to overcome Nevada’s problem of being outnumbered by personally lobbying members of Congress whose districts would be used to transport the waste.

But Nevada state officials believe that the project is quickly disintegrating and predict that it will not make it far enough to be an issue in the next campaign. The Department of Energy (DOE) no longer offers a timeline for when the project might be completed. The earliest possible time that the site might accept waste would be 2015, most officials said, but it would likely be closer to 2020.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) still needs to officially approve the government’s license requests to construct and use the repository. The application process would take a minimum of three to four years to gain approval, spokesmen for both sides said.

Officials continue to use every legal and political tool in their arsenal to hinder the project, delay its timetable and drive the government to attrition. Several lawsuits have been filed to delay or stop the project. And more litigation will certainly come if the project continues to move forward.

If the project does make it to the NRC license application process, Loux said yesterday that the state will continue to fight the project at every turn.

“We will be challenging virtually every aspect of the project before the NRC,” he said.

But most state leaders, including Loux, do not believe the DOE will even file an application with the regulatory agency to continue work on the mountain.

“The writing is on the wall,” he said. “It’s on life support. It is only a matter of time before the plug gets pulled. But I think most people think its going to happen fairly soon.”

Senators who have traditionally supported Yucca Mountain chided DOE for a lack of progress at a May 16 hearing of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

“I’m not here to pour water on anybody’s parade, but at what point do we think we need to look at something else?” asked Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), according to a report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

While some Congressmen have begun to sour on the idea of using Yucca, the nuclear industry has been forceful in lobbying Republican congressional allies to stand behind the project, largely because they need the waste to go somewhere and no other permanent repository site is even in the pipeline.

“The nuclear industry has been so loathe giving up the one bird they have,” Cherry said.

The Bush administration wants new Congressional legislation that would put the project on a trajectory for completion. But if they can’t swing Yucca Mountain, the nuclear industry will look somewhere else to store the waste, observers guess.

The Energy Department has been investigating potential new locations where waste might be temporarily stored while the project here develops.

“If this site is not chosen, they’ll pick up the marbles and go somewhere else,” said U.S. Geological Survey geologist David Bush.