After weeks of coming under fire from both Democratic and Republican opponents and critics for expressing a willingness to bring nuclear waste to Nevada, Republican Senate candidate Sam Brown said Saturday that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project should not be considered. .
“Over the last month, I’ve spent time talking to engineers and experts at Yucca Mountain. It is very clear that the project is dead,” Brown said on social media on Saturday.
“As I have said before, it should not and will not be reactivated as a nuclear waste repository,” Brown added.
Brown’s campaign did not respond Saturday to a request to identify where and when he said that earlier.
His statement Saturday stands in stark contrast to comments he made in 2022 but that came to light last month, in which Brown said not allowing nuclear waste in Nevada was “an incredible loss of revenue for our state.”
In a 2022 recording obtained and published by the Los Angeles Times last month, when asked about Yucca Mountain at a campaign event, Brown said that “one of the things I fear is the lack of understanding and the scaremongering that Harry Reid and others have spread” and “that we could lose an incredible revenue opportunity for our state in the future.”
“If we don’t act soon,” Brown added in those 2022 comments, “other states like Texas and New Mexico, right now, are evaluating whether or not they can essentially steal that opportunity from us. And at the end of the day, we all know that Nevada could use another big revenue stream and it sure would be a shame if we didn’t monopolize that and become a central hub for new developments we can do in Yucca.”
In a statement released by Brown in response to the Times story, he did not specifically reaffirm his support for bringing nuclear waste to Nevada, but said, “I am always interested in economic opportunities for Nevada that better diversify our economy.”
Since Congress passed the “Fuck Nevada” bill in 1987, which targeted the Yucca Mountain site northwest of Las Vegas for study as the nation’s nuclear waste facility, opposition from the Nevada public and of state politicians of both parties has been constant. overwhelming.
Since Brown’s 2022 statements became public, Senator Jacky Rosen and many other Democrats have criticized Brown for expressing his willingness to bring nuclear waste to Nevada.
And Jeff Gunter, Brown’s main rival for the Republican nomination to challenge Rosen in the general election, is airing an ad vowing to block the Yucca project if elected to the Senate and criticizing Brown’s willingness to “dump toxic nuclear waste here “.
Less than three weeks ago, Brown responded to Rosen and Gunter’s attacks on Yucca by telling The Hill that he is “not committed to supporting the opening of Yucca Mountain.
“However,” Brown added in that May 14 statement to The Hill, “I will consider all future proposals carefully vetted, with the safety of Nevadans being my top priority, while ensuring that the proposals are substantially beneficial from the point of view of from an economic point of view.”
“Leadership means considering all the economic opportunities that could better sustain the lives of Nevadans,” Brown added.
This is also in contrast to his statement on social media on Saturday, in which Brown said, “As the next U.S. senator from Nevada, I will stand with President Trump to oppose him.”
Trump’s opposition to the dumping of nuclear waste in Nevada was itself a change of position by the former president.
Yucca Mountain was officially designated as the country’s nuclear waste “repository” during the George W. Bush administration in 2002. But the project was the subject of legal and regulatory proceedings for years to come, until Barack Obama’s administration ordered the The Department of Energy suspended its license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and eliminated federal funding for the project.
While president, Trump attempted to restart Yucca funding, but was thwarted by Congress. Trump reversed positions during the 2022 campaign cycle in an effort to help Adam Laxalt, the Republican who defeated Brown in the 2022 Senate primary but lost to Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in the general election. The Biden administration has never included funding for the Yucca Mountain project and has assured Nevada officials that it has no plans to ever do so.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which includes a playbook of actions that the influential organization suggests should be urgent priorities in a second Trump administration, calls for resuming and funding Yucca Mountain’s licensing process.
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