Sen. Dean Heller’s (R-Nev.) primary challenger, the strongly pro-Trump campaign-trail veteran Danny Tarkanian, has yet to stake out an official position — in this U.S. Senate race, anyway — on disposing of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev.
Tarkanian has given many interviews since declaring his latest run for office but has not drawn a line in the sand on Yucca, to which the Donald Trump administration has proposed sending the nation’s nuclear waste in accordance with the 1987 amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
Opposition to Yucca is ordinarily a no-brainer in the Silver State, where successful politicians from both major parties have vowed to fight the project until their last breath. Heller himself belts out retired Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) old refrain at practically every opportunity: “Yucca Mountain is dead.”
Tarkanian has been harder to pin down during his third run for Congress in the last four election cycles. The matter is particularly tricky this time, as the Trump administration has requested $120 million in fiscal 2018 to resume the Energy Department’s efforts to open Yucca.
Anything other than full-throated support for Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear-waste disposal site would put Tarkanian at odds with his otherwise full-throated support for the president’s agenda from day one.
Tarkanian did not reply to a request for comment from Weapons Complex Morning Briefing about whether he supported the Trump administration’s proposal.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), the former Nevada attorney general, also opposes waste disposal at Yucca Mountain. So does the rest of Nevada’s congressional delegation — though the state’s lone GOP congressman, Rep. Mark Amodei, supports nuclear research at the site.
Tarkanian has at least two campaign websites, though neither lists any policy position on Yucca Mountain. Nor, for that matter, has any mention of the mountain popped up among the policy pronouncements he has made on Twitter.
In a 2012 race to represent Nevada’s 4th District in the House of Representatives, Tarkanian took a public position something like Amodei’s current position.
