LA Times: “Brown supported opening the facility, calling the failure to do so an ‘incredible loss of revenue for our state.’”

Breaking new audio released in a story published by the LA Times reveals that MAGA extremist Sam Brown supports storing the nation’s nuclear waste in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, a proposal he calls an “incredible opportunity.” 

This widely unpopular stance – considered to be “a third rail in Nevada politics” – puts Brown at odds with the vast majority of Nevada politicians, including fellow Republicans, as well as prominent business and environmental leaders who have spent decades fighting against federal efforts to use Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dumping ground. 

Read more about how Sam Brown’s toxic support for storing the nation’s nuclear waste in Nevada proves just how little he understands the state he’s trying to represent: 

LA Times: Nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain could roil Nevada U.S. Senate race

Seema Mehta 

April 30, 2024

• More than 3.5 million pounds of highly radioactive nuclear waste is buried on a coastal bluff just south of Orange County, near an idyllic beach name-checked in the Beach Boys’ iconic “Surfin’ U.S.A.”

• Spent fuel rods from the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant were supposed to be sent to a long-planned federal repository in Yucca Mountain, located in Nevada about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

• But vociferous opposition from a broad, bipartisan coalition of political, business, environmental and tribal leaders in Nevada has blocked the creation of the federal graveyard for nuclear detritus from San Onofre, as well as more than 100 other sites across the nation.

• Yucca Mountain is a third rail in Nevada politics — akin to the limits on California property tax increases created by Proposition 13. That’s why presidents of both parties have backed away from creating the repository in the Silver State, whose voters are increasingly critical to winning the White House.

• All of which makes comments by Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sam Brown about Yucca Mountain so remarkable.

• In recent years, Brown supported opening the facility, calling the failure to do so an “incredible loss of revenue for our state.” 

• Yucca Mountain was approved by Congress more than two decades ago, but Nevada politicians of both parties have blocked funding appropriations, so only preliminary work has been completed on the repository.

• Brown was asked about the future of the project two years ago.

• “If we don’t act soon, other states … are assessing whether or not they can essentially steal that opportunity from us,” Brown said in response to a question at a 2022 Southern Hills Republican Women’s luncheon at Dragon Ridge Country Club in Henderson, Nev.

• “We all know that Nevada could use another great source of revenue and it sure would be a shame if we didn’t monopolize on that and become a central hub of new development that we can do at Yucca,” he said in a recording of the meeting obtained by The Times.

• A spokesperson for Rosen said the Republican’s position endangers Nevadans and makes him unfit to represent the state.

• “Nevada Republicans and Democrats have been fighting against storing dangerous nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain for decades, but Sam Brown agrees with the D.C. politicians in Congress who still want to turn Nevada into the nation’s dumping ground for toxic waste,” said spokesperson Johanna Warshaw.

• Though the creation of long-term radioactive waste storage on federal land at Yucca Mountain, near a historic nuclear testing range, was approved by Congress in 2002, efforts to build it have been blocked by Presidents Obama, Trump and Biden, in part a recognition of Nevadans’ importance in the nation’s politics as well as the power of Sin City’s casinos.

• Three out of four likely voters in the state opposed the project in a 2017 poll conducted for the Reno Gazette-Journal.

• Nevada is also among the state that will determine which party controls the Senate, where Democrats currently have a 51-49 majority. Though Rosen polls better than Biden, the contest is viewed as one of the most competitive Senate races in the nation.

• Brown, in his 2022 remarks, said that “a lack of understanding” and “fear mongering” by the late former Sen. Harry Reid, a Democratic powerhouse, and others would ultimately harm the state’s economy.

• But many Nevada Republicans also have opposed the project, including former Govs. Brian Sandoval and Jim Gibbons, Rep. Mark Amodei, former Atty. Gen. Adam Laxalt and former Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, as well as business groups such as the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and the Las Vegas Convention And Visitors Authority. 

• A bipartisan vote to move forward with Yucca Mountain, long blocked by Reid, occurred in 2018 as Rosen, then a member of Congress, ran against GOP Sen. Dean Heller. Though the proposal passed the House, Heller effectively blocked funding for the creation of the repository in the Senate before Rosen beat him in the general election.

• Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, predicted that Brown’s comments will come back to haunt him.

• “I can imagine the ads about the dangers and nuclear power accidents and the like,” Green said. “I don’t think he has done himself any favors.