Silver Dollars and Wooden Nickels

WOODEN NICKEL: To those in the state of Washington who've gone to court to push for the opening of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada. The Obama administration canceled the project in 2009, and Congress has not funded it. Oh, and an awful lot of Nevadans don't want it. If Washingtonians want it so badly, let them have it.

SILVER DOLLAR: To Carson High senior Juan Hernandez, the wunderkind whose senior science project may advance research on aging. This unassuming 17-year-old spent hours manually annotating genomes and examining spliced sections of exons and introns. We don't know what any of that means, but we're impressed.

SILVER DOLLAR: To the Carson High School students who take part in the Naval Junior ROTC program. The outgoing officers passed the torch to their successors last week in a ceremony that affirmed our faith in the youth of today. These young patriots set a great example for their peers and are assets to the community.

WOODEN NICKEL: To members of the Occupy movement in San Francisco and Oakland, who gave themselves yet another black eye last week in the violent, destructive May Day demonstrations and blockades. For a group that professes to represent "the 99 percent," Occupiers in those two cities particularly have a knack for awful public relations.