The airport servicing the greater Las Vegas area may soon bear the name of the man who killed Yucca Mountain.
In a unanimous vote back in February, the Clark County Commission agreed to a proposal that would rename McCarran International airport after retired Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), according to meeting minutes. The airport’s current namesake was the late Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nev.), who represented the state from 1933 to 1954.
This isn’t the first time Nevada pols have tried to rename McCarran. In 2017, Clark County commissioner Tick Segerblom (D) — then a state senator — introduced a bill to change the airport’s name which failed in committee. Segerblom called attention to the late McCarran’s politics which he called “textbook white nationalism.”
“Las Vegas’s main airport was named McCarran to honor his work establishing the U.S. Air Force and to commemorate his role passing important airline regulations,” Segerblom said in a platform statement on his website. “But we can’t ignore the darker aspects of the man’s legacy.”
The name change needs to be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration before the rebranding process can begin.
In the world of nuclear waste management, the pugilistic, hard-driving ex-Senate leader Reid is famously known for his opposition to the proposed Yucca Mountain spent fuel repository located in Nye County, Nev. He successfully lobbied then-president Barack Obama to pull Yucca’s license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2010 and defund the project, after which Reid proclaimed — often, and well beyond the end of his Senate career in 2017 — “Yucca Mountain is dead.”
The federal government hasn’t made too much progress on the issue since then. The Trump administration tried unsuccessfully to restart Yucca Mountain, which remains the only authorized site for a deep-geologic repository, and President Biden’s administration has already said it will not support the site. No serious alternative for a permanent storage site had emerged.
