LVN letters to the editor for Friday, May 18

Open letter to Rep. Mark Amodei

This is an open letter to Rep. Mark Amodei responding to his vote against continuing work toward opening Yucca Mountain as a repository for spent nuclear fuel.

So, Mark, you went along in an effort to get along. Your vote against Yucca Mountain may endear you to your fellow state representatives in the House and to the casino owners in Las Vegas. It may buy you some votes from the uninformed electorate. But it did no real favor for Nevada or the nation.

You speak of a seat at the table. Well, son, you may have just voted yourself and the rest of Nevada out of one. The mountain and the work done there to prepare it for a spent nuclear fuel repository and potential world-class facility for recycling the fuel belongs to the U.S. government. This, I believe, has been made possible by your and other politicians’ reluctance to challenge the feds for ownership and management of the 87 percent of Nevada they continue to control.

With a vote of 340-72, there is a groundswell of support for a safe place to store spent nuclear fuel until it can be recycled, like France has been doing successfully for many years.

I wish you and other opponents of Yucca would get it in your heads that it wouldn’t be a “dump site.”

The other states, which have been forward-thinking enough to realize the advantages of nuclear power, are going to force us to accept whatever the feds choose to hand us when we could have a piece of what can be a $13 trillion windfall.

I thought you had been open-minded on this issue, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been fooled by a politician.

Jim Falk

Fallon