Jim Day political cartoon published by the Las Vegas Review Journal in 2010On Thursday, February 6, 2020, President Trump announced he would request zero funding for Fiscal Year 2021, for the proposed Yucca Mountain dump on Western Bands of the Shoshone Indian Nation lands in Nevada.
But the Yucca dump has been declared dead previously, only to have proponents attempt to resurrect the zombie! President Obama cancelled the dump proposal in 2010 (see image, left -- and be sure to count the toes!). U.S. House Republicans like Fred Upton (R-MI) and John Shimkus (R-IL) have tried ever since to restart Yucca licensing at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. President Trump, for the past three years, has unsuccessfully requested hundreds of millions of dollars of annual Yucca dump funding. This, despite the fact that Trump indicated on the campaign trail in 2015 to 2016 that he would respect Nevada on the Yucca dump issue. He did the exact opposite from 2017 till last Thursday!
As reported by the Aiken Standard:
U.S. Rep. Susie Lee, a Nevada Democrat, last week suggested the president could be playing "political games."
"When you ran in 2016, you said you opposed Yucca. Then, once elected, you wanted to fund it," Lee wrote on Twitter, responding to the president. "Now, election season is here and you're against Yucca again."
If and when Trump changes his mind (yet again), back to pro-Yucca dump, a coalition of more than a thousand environmental groups is committed to keeping the Yucca dump dead -- just as they have for 33 long years, ever since the "Screw Nevada bill" of 1987!
And many hundreds of environmental and environmental justice groups are committed to blocking consolidated interim storage facilities, as currently targeted at New Mexico and Texas, just as they did the CISF targeted at Utah in the past.