A $108 million funding cut. Nearly 70 employees canned. Ridiculed as scientifically unsound and possibly corrupt. Sucks to be Yucca Mountain these days. Save for pandering to Democratic presidential candidates, no one’s saying the $58 billion nuclear waste dump is on its deathbed. But the 26-year-old project, into which taxpayers have already pumped $9 billion, is certainly on its shakiest ground. If it dies, what’ll we do with the space? We’ve got some ideas:
• Create a seventh school district region: We could get trailers from FEMA and ferry students via the monorail (hey, it needs riders). Overcrowding problems solved, for a year or two anyway.
• Build America’s largest homeless encampment: Seems like a more humane way of accomplishing Mayor Oscar Goodman’s out-of-sight, out-of-mind, out-of-panhandling range plan for having indigents shackled, er, shacking in abandoned prison in Jean.
• Develop a master-planned community with a desert-y name, like Brittlebrush Pines: Because a 150,000-acre swath of land is a terrible thing (for developers) to waste.
• Host the 2012 presidential debates: If we don’t like what the candidates say, we can simply close the steel-reinforced doors.
• Develop Project Cave-y Center: We’ve should exploit the casinos-in-a-cave niche before Macau does.
• Bring Burning Man south: If there’s one thing that’s better than one middle-of-nowhere festival “dedicated to self-expression, self-reliance and art as the center of community,” it’s of two of them.
• Bury the ego of attorney Glen “I’ve been living the life of a rock star for so long” Lerner there.
• Relocate the biennial legislative session: With Clark County being Nevada’s de facto seat of power, this would bring politicians closer to controlling/ bullying/ lobbying/ bitching-out distance.
• World’s largest illegal fireworks launching zone: Friends, countrymen and scofflaws, bring your cherry bombs and your M-80s, your fire crackers and your Roman Candles, your bottle rockets and anything else that packs the punch of a mini mortar shell.