DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

On July 23, 1952, U.S. Senator George Malone of Nevada announced formation of a committee, chaired by former state engineer Alfred Merritt Smith, to work for installation of the world's first atomic power plant to be located at Ruby Hill in Eureka County.

A little more than a year later, Malone released a letter from the president of the Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratories of New York expressing interest in building the Eureka County plant, and also revealed that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had let a contract to Kidde Nuclear for a study of the idea.

The plant was never built, but a decade later, on Feb. 18, 1964, the Atomic Energy Commission invited utilities to submit proposals for a nuclear power plant in Nevada, and U.S. Senator Alan Bible said Sierra Pacific Power Company had acquired land in Lyon County for a nuclear facility capable of generating 150,000 kilowatts.

This endeavor, too, came to nothing, but as late as May 1973 Sierra Pacific was still trying to put up a nuclear power plant.

Fortunately for Nevada, none of these projects reached completion. These days, Sierra Pacific (now NV Energy), sensitive to public sentiment, has dropped its nuclear ambitions to portray itself instead as environmentally sensitive.

But the mayor of Ely, a nuclear energy promoter and others have been touting the possibility of a nuclear power plant construction in White Pine County.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, who has been instrumental in killing coal power plants in eastern Nevada, has less objection to nuclear plants. Two years ago when I asked him about nuclear, he said, "If I have a choice between coal and nuclear, it's an easy choice to make." He's adamant that coal plants be stopped. When I asked him if, by blocking coal, he was aiding the construction of nuclear plants and thus causing generation of more nuclear waste and thus creating additional pressure to open the Yucca Mountain dump, he replied:

"I don't know about that, but the situation we have is this -- we have to get away from fossil fuel," he said. "We're using 21 million barrels of oil a day, importing almost 70 percent of that. We can't produce our way out of the problems we have. We do not have clean coal technology yet. We're living in a world where global warming is here -- not taking place [in the future], it's here."

Back when Nevada's Sen. Malone was trying to get a plant for his state, the federal government was heavily into promoting nuclear power. Although the science was new and much about nuclear power unknown, federal officials spread plants at home and abroad like atomic Johnny Appleseeds, making promises that would come back to haunt the United States (U.S. officials agreed to accept the nuclear waste of nations that would agree to build power plants). Along the way we learned that nuclear power was more complicated that anyone realized.

While there are some who say water is no longer the issue it once was, in fact in Ely in September local residents of this desert state were told by a nuclear plant promoter that a nuclear plant would require a minimum of 25,000 acre-feet of water per year, or nearly 8.15 billion gallons annually.

Cleanups at decommissioned plants such as Sacramento's Rancho Seco are incredibly expensive.

Nuclear plants, whose champions describe their product as "clean" power, generate the most troublesome waste humankind has ever produced.

It's doubtful that a single U.S. nuclear power plant has ever turned a profit. They survive economically solely because of U.S. government support.

And a Nevada plant would eliminate one of Nevada's most potent arguments the state wields in the battle to stop the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump -- that this state generates no waste itself and so should not be saddled with the dump for those wastes.