(Though of course everyone is careful not to do the one thing that might work -- actually challenging federal sovereignty over the land, given the inability of the DOE or any other federal agency to show a bill of sale proving Yucca Mountain was ever “purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be,” as required by the Constitution before the central government can “exercise exclusive Legislation” anywhere within the 50 states.)

Why oppose Yucca Mountain?

Yes, the waste dump is being forced on Nevada without the consent of the populace. But was there ever a plebiscite to OK the placement of Nellis Air Force Base, only a few miles from downtown Las Vegas (Yucca Mountains lies 100 miles further away), a base where the military will neither confirm nor deny active nuclear weapons have been stored? Not that anyone can recall.

No, the underlying theory here is that the waste repository uses unproven technology and is therefore unsafe: Radiation from the spent nuclear fuel could eventually leak into the groundwater, scaring away vital tourists of our great-grandchildren’s generation.

Tourists -- many of whom have spent all their lives less than 100 miles from an active nuclear plant where spent fuel rods are now stored in glorified swimming pools -- will be afraid to come here to gamble if they learn those same fuel rods are now buried inside a mountain 100 miles from Las Vegas.

Adhering to this line has become a virtual catechism for Nevada politicians -- they stray from this talking point at their peril.

So imagine, if you will, the kind of outcry that might be heard from Sen. Reid’s office if some wayward young Nevada Republican were to propose a $5 million federal “seed” grant to help establish an above-ground nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at the Nevada Test Site, as close or even closer to Las Vegas than Yucca Mountain.

Good grief. To those who worry that radioactive technology is too dangerous a genie to be allowed out of the bottle, reprocessing fuel to extract plutonium -- famously “the most toxic substance on earth” -- is to geologic burial at Yucca Mountain as “The War of the Worlds” is to Steven Spielberg’s cute little “E.T.”

Think Kerr-McGee Plutonium. Think martyred nuclear whistle-blower Karen Silkwood. Oh, the horror.

Well, guess what? A Nevada politician is now proposing that an entity run by a current and a recently retired administrator at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, be awarded a $5 million “seed” grant from the federal Department of Energy to conduct site studies for a test-scale nuclear waste reprocessing facility, presumably at the Nevada Test Site.

A Nevada politician has thus broken ranks, not only implying that hauling nuclear waste to Nevada might not be a bad thing, but actually proposing that it be ground up and converted to dangerous plutonium, right here.

And how has Sen. Harry Reid, head of Nevada’s delegation and champion of the war against Yucca Mountain, responded?

Um, actually ... it’s Harry Reid that’s backing the proposal.

Journey back with us now seven years. At the end of 1998, David Thomassen of the DOE admits that if a $300,000 grant request for a fancy DNA analyzer to study bird migratory routes at UNLV had come through regular channels “we would have sent it back and said it was not relevant to our mission.”

But since the request comes from an ornithologist named Donald Baepler, who runs the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at UNLV, and since it’s backed by the powerful Sen. Reid, who routinely channels tens of millions of dollars to the Center, the DOE promptly issues the bird grant under the category of “congressional earmarks.”

Now, in 2006, Sen. Reid is pushing two men -- Tony Hechanova, current head of the nuclear science division of the aforementioned Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at UNLV, and the center’s original director, now retired, whose name happens to be Donald Baepler -- as appropriate recipients for a $5 million DOE contract to conduct site studies for a nuclear waste reprocessing factory.

(Mr. Hechanova did not return an April 18 phone call; Mr. Baepler was en route to Boston.)

This in no way contradicts the senator’s firm position against nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, he explains. “We have been doing research stuff for years dealing with nuclear waste,” the senator said this week. “It doesn’t mean just because they do research that it is bad.”

Well, of course not. If UNLV scientists can win a DOE contract to do valuable nuclear physics on the blackboard -- assuming we find this an appropriate use for federal funds in the first place -- go to it.

But this contract isn’t merely to do theoretical work. It’s to conduct a “site study for a test-scale nuclear waste reprocessing factory.” Surely the goal of any such study is to demonstrate that Nevada might be a good site for a “full-scale nuclear waste reprocessing factory.”

And maybe it would. But is it the senator’s position that such a chemically active reprocessing plant would be a boon to Nevada, while burying the same fuel rods inside a mountain would terrify tourists for generations to come?

That seems odd.

Back in 1998, Mr. Baepler said researchers at the Harry Reid Center would not let the DOE’s $300,000 gift for his bird machine influence their science.

“We don’t owe them anything for this,” Baepler said of the Energy Department. “We’re totally independent of Yucca Mountain and totally independent of the Nevada Test Site.”

But, as a politician once said, “That was then.”