Chuck Muth: Rory Reid says Dad wrong; Yucca Mountain is safe?

Harry Reid has made a political career out of playing the earthquake card over and over again in his non-stop efforts to kill the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project and every high-paying, tax-generating job that comes with it.

On July 30, 2008, for example, KRNV-News 4 in Reno reported that "Nevada Sen. Harry Reid spoke today about the potential for grave consequences at Yucca Mountain if an earthquake ever struck in the area of the proposed nuclear dump site."

Indeed, Harry even features an online petition on his U.S. Senate Web site that states "DOE does not even have complete plans to transport nuclear waste or to build the dump at Yucca Mountain, which is in an earthquake-prone environment."

Hmm. I guess his son must have missed a memo.

In announcing his candidacy for governor last week, Democrat Rory Reid released a 30-page campaign document outlining his "new economic vision for Nevada." Most of it is nothing more than political pap and platitudes, but there is one section calling for making Nevada "A Technology Hub." And get a load of this:

"Since the 1990s, IT (Information Technology) has been the principal driver of increasing economic growth. Nevada is now a unique crossroads of the IT world and has a competitive advantage in the data storage business. These are companies that save and warehouse electronic data. There is no safer place in the country to store data: No hurricanes, no tornadoes, and no active fault lines."

What?!

There is no safer place for critical storage facilities than Nevada because there are no hurricanes, tornadoes or ACTIVE FAULT LINES? Does Sen. Daddy Dearest know about this?

Then again, Nevada is a pretty big state geographically, so Rory's probably talking about safe storage areas somewhere up north around Elko or Winnemucca, right? Well, let's see:

"Our secure environment makes us a logical choice to serve as the back-up headquarters for corporations based on the West Coast. After 9/11, corporations started planning for disasters. We could store a company's electronic records and systems so that, in case of an emergency, the business could relocate here and with one flip of a switch be fully operational again. The vast potential for security and solar energy in Nye County, for instance - between Yucca Mountain and the Nevada Test Site - along with their proximity to the IT resources in Las Vegas, could support such data centers and back-up operations."

What?!

The environmentally safest place in the United States to store critical, irreplaceable electronic records is at ... Yucca Mountain?

I've known for a while now that most of what Harry Reid says about safety concerns over the Yucca Mountain project is pure, unadulterated political flapdoodle, but it's interesting to discover that his son apparently feels the same way.

• Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, a non-profit public policy grassroots advocacy organization. He may be reached at chuck@citizen

outreach.com.