Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) died Tuesday, according to a statement from his family.
Reid, who was Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, died “peacefully” Tuesday afternoon following a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, his wife Landra Reid said in a statement. He was 82 years old.
Reid was best known to nuke-watchers as the politician arguably most responsible for the demise of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. During the Barack Obama administration, Reid and the Nevada delegation successfully lobbied the White House to cut the Nye County, Nev. site’s funding and pull its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
During his tenure in Congress, and even after retiring in 2017, Reid often proclaimed that “Yucca Mountain is dead.”
So far, he’s yet to be proven wrong.
The political inertia Reid helped solidify in Nevada persisted into the Donald Trump administration, frustrating Trump’s attempts to revive the site licensing process. Today, Yucca remains little more than a construction site. The Joe Biden administration has already committed not to fund the site for anything more than guns and gates in the upcoming fiscal year.
Reid was Senate majority leader during the Obama administration, from 2007 to 2015. He began his tenure in the Senate in 1987 — the same year the Nuclear Waste Policy Act designated Yucca Mountain as the national home for spent nuclear fuel. That measure, which the freshman Reid opposed, became known as the “Screw Nevada Bill.”
Reid, characteristically, fought back.
