As reported by the Daily Light of Texas.
Barton's cheerleading for the Yucca dump targeted at Nevada is no surprise. He's been doing that for many years and decades -- and the nuclear power industry campaign contributions have consequently poured in to him.
Barton's love affair with dirty energy industries is infamous. He was forced to step down from chairmanship of the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee in 2010, after apologizing to BP for the Obama administration's and congressional Democrats' strong response to BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe!
In the mid-1980s, Deaf Smith County, Texas had been targeted for the western high-level radioactive waste dump, right along with Yucca in Nevada, and Hanford in Washington State. But Texas (with 32 U.S. Reps.) and Washington (with a dozen or more; the two states also shared the House Speakership and the House Majority Leader between them!) then decided Nevada (with a single member of the U.S. House at the time) was the perfect place, and helped, along with eastern states targeted for a second dump-site, to "Screw Nevada" with the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, singling out Yucca as the only site in the country to be further considered for the dubious dump.
Ironically enough, the same bill, H.R. 3053, that Barton is cheering in regards to Yucca, would also make legal the private, for-profit (at federal taxpayer expense) "temporary storage" of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel -- including at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, west Texas, a lead candidate. But Barton seems supportive of turning his state into a de facto permanent parking lot dump for highly radioactive waste, so long as the right handful of people are making all the money.