The Yucca Mountain scoping meeting put on by the U.S. Department of Energy in Amargosa Valley last year was sparsely attended, with DOE experts almost outnumbering the public.

There were 43 people who signed the register in the meeting room at the LongStreet Inn and Casino, of whom only 12 spoke.

That contrasts with the packed and hostile crowd during the Yucca Mountain site selection hearing in October 2001, when 61 people went up to the microphone at the Bob Ruud Community Center in Pahrump to use their allotted five minutes.

The political theater outside the 2001 hearing included a bus featuring a traveling museum against nuclear waste, sponsored by the group Shundahai, which had an office in Pahrump for a brief time. They also carried along a mock nuclear waste cask.

Shundahai was a group with the stated goal of breaking the nuclear chain by building alliances with indigenous communities and environmental, peace and human rights movements. It was formed by Western Shoshone elder Corbin Harney in 1995.

Former Pahrump Town Board Chairman Tim Leavitt read a statement from then Gov. Kenny Guinn that Yucca Mountain "is an issue that is paramount to the health and safety of Nevadans."

Doreen Hagen, a member of the Prairie Island Tribal Council, came all the way from southern Minnesota to push for transporting the nuclear waste from near their tribal reservation to a more secure site, like Yucca Mountain.

Pahrump resident Janet Toy noted Nevada has the third highest number of earthquakes in the country. Nevada Community Health Nurse Maureen Budahl called Nye County the frontier when it comes to federal standards relating to health care services.

Today, the hearings are much more subdued, even moribund.

Even long-time Yucca Mountain opponent Sally Devlin said she may not show up at the public hearing Monday in Amargosa Valley, unless she can find someone to give her a ride.

Allen Benson, director of the U.S. Department of Energy office of external affairs, said the public hearings are held in Amargosa Valley now instead of Pahrump because it lies closer to the Yucca Mountain site. The DOE has also gone to an open house format, where many people who want to speak can give their comments one-on-one to a court reporter, instead of standing in front of a room full of people.

Devlin said a lot of the drive behind the anti-nuclear movement locally lost momentum when Harney, the Western Shoshone spiritual elder, died earlier this year.

Devlin added of Yucca Mountain, "it's not going to happen. I want our money back."

Under the current system, Devlin said, "What happens is nobody comes. They (DOE officials) write down your thing, that's the end of it, then they go home."

Devlin, an avid student of the project, correctly reminded people back in 2001 there would be two Yucca Mountains. Nye County nuclear waste project office officials confirmed recently the Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires the DOE to come out with a recommendation for a second nuclear waste repository in the eastern U.S. by 2010.

Other groups who showed up to protest the Yucca Mountain project in past meetings in Pahrump included Las Vegas-based Citizen Alert, which is still active, and the Nevada Desert Experience.

John Pawlak, who formerly led tours of Yucca Mountain while working at the information office on Postal Road in Pahrump, said he researched the safety of Pahrump before moving here.

Pawlak said he became interested in the issue of nuclear waste when he lived near the Enrico Fermi nuclear lab in Chicago, where the atomic bomb was developed, and had to be cleaned up because of to its proximity to the Des Plaines River.

"Nobody really cares any more," Pawlak said.

The federal government is cutting jobs at projects like Yucca Mountain, he said, to funnel money into the war in Iraq. But Pawlak said the public should be a lot more concerned about the health effects of the 828 nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site than the storing of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

Ed Hanson, a long time member of the Pahrump town nuclear waste and environmental advisory committee, said he doesn't expect members of his board will attend the hearings.

Sen. Harry Reid, D.-Nev., insists repeatedly the Yucca Mountain Project will never become a reality and is just a waste of money.

But when asked whether Nevada residents should then bother to attend the hearings, Reid said in a statement, "This is the most important issue facing our state. It's important that Nevadans attend these hearings so their concerns about this flawed project will be heard."