Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) has drawn a primary challenge from the right in Danny Tarkanian: a man Heller, the Senate’s antagonist-in-chief for the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in his state, quickly dismissed as a political failure.
Tarkanian announced his candidacy Tuesday on Fox News.
The Tarkanian camp did not reply to multiple requests for comment regarding the candidate’s current stance on Yucca Mountain. During a previous election bid in 2012 Tarkanian said he opposed making Yucca Mountain a nuclear waste repository, but supported reprocessing spent nuclear fuel at the site.
Using Yucca for nuclear fuel reprocessing, or at least as a nuclear site that is not a waste repository, is not an original Tarkanian idea. Nevada’s lone GOP congressman, Rep. Mark Amodei, supports nuclear research at Yucca Mountain as a means of producing some economic benefit for the state. The concept has never gotten serious traction in Congress.
Rather, Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain as the sole repository for U.S. spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste. In 2008, then-President George W. Bush’s Energy Department filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license Yucca as a waste site. In 2010, then-President Barack Obama effectively canceled that application by defunding it.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced his administration wanted to reopen the application.
Tarkanian has won several Republican nominations but lost every general election he entered. Most recently, he lost a 2016 bid for the U.S. House to the strongly anti-Yucca Rep. Jacky Rosen (D).
Rosen has already declared she will run for Heller’s seat in 2018, which would, if Tarkanian wins his primary challenge, set up a rematch of last year’s close race for Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District. Rosen, a political neophyte, won that contest by fewer than 2 percentage points.
Yucca is located in Nye County, which is within Nevada’s 4th Congressional District. Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D), another reliable anti-Yucca vote, represents the district.
In a prepared statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper, Heller’s office derided Tarkanian as a “perennial candidate” who “will lose in the primary.”
