Hillary raises Yucca issue in Nevada

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LAS VEGAS — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is campaigning through Nevada with a laserlike focus on local issues — holding small forums with voters about economic woes and the Yucca Mountain.

During her roundtable yesterday on the nuclear waste site here, panelists praised the New York Democrat for the work her husband's administration did with Yucca, and applauded her saying the toxic waste also is a homeland security problem.

"It's an issue that concerns every American," she said. Later, Mrs. Clinton told reporters, "I think we need to go back and start over. We should not be guided by politics, we should be guided by science. We have a serious problem, how are we going to handle it."

While Sen. Barack Obama drew big crowds in nearby Henderson, Mrs. Clinton offered her Yucca Mountain policy roundtable with nine Nevada panelists before an audience of fewer than 200 people.

"Thanks very much for being here and doing this," gushed Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force.

Another panelist, a nuclear waste consultant, said Americans don't realize that moving the waste across the country would mean residents in Atlanta, St. Louis and elsewhere would be "bathed in this radiation."

Mrs. Clinton nodded and lamented the concern over the dangers of transporting the waste.

"It's not only the fear of an accident," she said. "One of the big challenges facing terrorists who are trying to get a hold of radioactive material is getting enough of it ... if we have this much movement of this much radioactive material, it's already inside the United States."

The government first studied Yucca Mountain, located 90 miles from Las Vegas, as a potential site for storing nuclear waste three decades ago. President Bush in 2002 approved a measure to clear the way to open the repository in 2017. There is now about 50,000 tons of the solid, ceramiclike material stored at nuclear power plants across the nation, and 2,000 more tons of material is produced every year.

Environmental groups and many Democrats have vowed to block the site's opening, and now politicians are scrambling to come up with another solution for storing the radioactive material. The Clinton administration opposed the site and delayed its opening for years, including vetoing a bill in 2000 to start temporarily storing waste at Yucca. Most Nevadans oppose the site.