From Deseret News archives:
Kerry vows if elected he will not send nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain
In a state that Bush won by four percentage points in 2000, Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, hammered at the administration's support for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"Yucca Mountain to me is a symbol of the recklessness and arrogance with which they are willing to proceed with respect to the safety issues and concerns of the American people," Kerry said of the administration.
"This is not just a Nevada issue, this is not just about Yucca Mountain," he told a small crowd of invited guests at a middle school here. "This is about America. This is about a relationship between the people who lead and the people, you, the governed. It's about promises kept and promises broken."
In 2000, Bush followed his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, in promising to veto plans to store high-level nuclear waste at the mountain, saying in late September that he would not send waste to any site unless it was proved safe scientifically. Once in office, amid scientific debate over safety, Bush accepted an Energy Department recommendation to approve Yucca Mountain as a storage site.
Showing its awareness of the issue's importance in the state, the Bush campaign circulated multiple memorandums on Tuesday scouring Kerry's Senate record to show six instances over a decade in which he cast votes that could be construed as supporting storage at Yucca Mountain. Republicans also pointed to Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who backed storage there before joining the ticket.
"The Kerry-Edwards ticket was for Yucca Mountain before they were against it, and Nevadans should not be fooled by election-year pandering," this state's Republican senator, John Ensign, said in a statement circulated by the Bush campaign. "Nevadans deserve more than efforts to scare and mislead them."
But Ensign himself when pressed on a cable show last week said of Kerry that "on this one issue he's been better than George Bush, but that's on one issue." And campaigning alongside Kerry on Tuesday was Ensign's Democratic counterpart Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid dismissed the votes cited by the Republicans, saying, "John Kerry has been with us every time we've needed him." "You can debate whether John Kerry is better on education, whether he's better on the environment," Reid told reporters, "but on Yucca Mountain, there's no debate at all."
