BOB MCCRACKEN Nye County History Advertisement

For the past 13,000 or more years, Nye County's history has been shaped mostly by its geography -- large and magnificent, to be sure.

Native Americans lived here as hunters and gatherers, skillfully surviving off the plants, animals and other resources that nature provided.

The first Euroamerican explorers in central Nevada between the late 1820s and the 1850s, such as Jedediah Smith and John C. Fremont, lived off the land much like the Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone, who were here when they arrived.

Between the mid-1860s and, say, the early 1920s, nearly all of Nye County's communities were founded on the basis of the discovery of nearby mineral deposits, including Ione and Belmont, founded in 1865; Reveille, in 1866; Montgomery, later known as Johnnie, in 1890 or 1891; and of course, Tonopah, in 1900 and Rhyolite, in 1904.

The list of such communities in Nye County is long. The point is that most of them owed their existence to the treasure that nature had put there -- human beings only took advantage of what nature provided.

The same can be said for the many ranches and farms that sprang up throughout Nye County to feed the mining communities. Their founders utilized fertile land and water sources provided by nature.

It is true that nature did not provide the railroads and automobiles that appeared in the county beginning in the early 1900s, but the introduction of both represented no serious attempt to further build a civilization on a basis of anything other than what was already there.

History changes

The first history-changing effort by Nevadans to construct an economy on something other than what nature had put there occurred in 1931, when gambling and easy divorce were legalized. This led to growth in Nevada not bound by nature's gifts, but through thriving off the larger American society.

The idea was, some people like to gamble -- so make it easy and legal for them to do so, and make plenty of money in the process. It was a win-win situation for everybody. The same can be said for easy divorce.

These simple legal changes led to the state's transformation into what it is today, featuring a large economy bound not by geography but by tourism.

A second, though much smaller, history-altering event occurred in Nevada in 1950, and unlike the legalization of gambling and easy divorce, it had a substantial impact on Nye County. I am speaking of the establishment of the Nevada Test Site, created entirely within the county.

The Test Site can be seen as Nye County's wide open spaces converging with modern science -- i.e., nuclear physics -- for the development and testing of nuclear weapons.

It represented Nye County building an economy based, for the first time, on something other than what nature provided.

In the 1980s, atomic testing accounted, directly and indirectly, for about 9 percent of the southern Nevada economy, likely more in Nye County. In my view, the creation of the Nevada Test Site represented a new way for the county to interface and do business with the world. It was a model and a harbinger of possible big things to come.

The first big thing was Yucca Mountain, the federal government's $100 billion-plus plan to store the nation's spent nuclear fuel in Nye County. If Nevada had played its cards right -- and it's likely still not too late -- Yucca Mountain could have transformed Nye County and, indeed, all of southern Nevada, into a world class high-technology center.

But too many of Nevada's political leaders lacked the vision and political skill to grab onto the future, and so the repository is essentially now on hold. And who can say what its future will bring?

Many believe Yucca Mountain is not dead and that sooner or later political shifts and the smartening-up of Nevada's leadership and public will lead to Yucca Mountain becoming a reality.

History marches on

In the meantime, history marches on.

A tidal wave of change and opportunity (and serious problems) are headed this way. For example, we in the Western US, along with the rest of the world, face two closely related problems -- availability of clean energy and fresh water. We don't have enough of either and shortages of both will surely challenge us in the decades ahead.

Southern Nevada lacks sufficient water for sustained long-term growth. Pumping the aquifers in Lincoln and White Pine counties, as Las Vegas now proposes to do, is, in my view, unacceptable.

One solution to southern Nevada's future water problem, by no means original with me, is desalinization of sea water on the Southern California coast. The following proposal would go a long way toward solving southern Nevada's water problems.

* California's share of the Colorado River water needs to be greatly reduced, if not eliminated entirely, and reallocated to upstream states, especially Nevada and Arizona.

* As compensation to California, upstream states should pay for construction of desalinization plants on the California coast sufficient to replace California's water in proportion to the share yielded.

* Agriculture in Arizona and California using Colorado River water should be eliminated.

* If the Colorado River flow "dries up," as some researchers predict will happen, desalinated seawater from the coast can be pumped upstream to Nevada and Arizona.

* Such efforts, of course, will require large amounts of energy -- green energy. The use of fossil fuels in pumping and desalinization should not be allowed.

* The only reasonable source of such large amounts of green energy is nuclear power.

One often hears that nuclear power plants require large quantities of water for cooling. Most people do not realize that nuclear power can now be produced in a closed-loop system with no significant need of water for cooling. These nuclear power plants can be placed underground. Several such reactors could be constructed in Nye County and the energy transported to the California coast for use in pumping and desalinizing water, and for general use in California.

A 1000-megawatt nuclear plant would directly employ about 800 people at an average salary of about $70,000 per year. The construction of several such reactors in Nye County would transform the county's economy, ushering in a new historical era.

Moreover, there is currently a discussion of what to do with the Nevada Test Site.

A number of what can only be described as small plans have been proposed. I believe the highest use to which the Test Site can be devoted is production of nuclear power and further development of nuclear technology, including its uses in medicine, as the Reagan administration and Nevada Sen. Chic Hecht proposed in the 1980s.

Breeder reactors and spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plants could be constructed at the site. Demonstration plants for the transmutation of spent nuclear fuel could be built. In addition to employing thousands, such facilities would be giant steps taken toward solving our nation's energy problems for the foreseeable future.

And they would enable us to avoid unnecessarily plastering Nye County's valleys with miles of ugly, water-hungry, low-pay, job-creation-poor solar units and posting mountain regions with forests of unsightly and job-creation-poor wind turbines, all of which produce energy only part time.

I am for solar and wind energy, but they are not the road to a bright future for Nye County.

Think about it

And think about this: Dr. George A. Olah is a biochemist. He is the director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Institute at the University of Southern California and won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1994. He is the author of 1,300 scientific papers and 15 books.

In his book "Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy," he and his associates describe a potentially revolutionary energy-producing system whereby water and carbon dioxide, with the input of energy, can be chemically transformed to yield methanol, a flammable liquid form of alcohol.

Methanol can be transported in pipelines, burned in automobile engines and used to make such necessities of modern life as plastics and fertilizers. The CO2 can be obtained from power plants that burn coal or natural gas, or extracted potentially from the atmosphere.

Olah suggests the energy to produce methanol be obtained from nuclear reactors. Perhaps Nye County can play a role in the development of this revolutionary technology.

Let's get Olah or one of his associates up here to help us start thinking in such terms.