The Obama White House made an unfortunate and ungracious choice in launching a preemptive attack on Rick Perry’s nomination this week. Spokesman Josh Earnest did his best deadpan as he disparaged the choice as one based on politics and not merit.
But what about President Obama’s appointments of Ken Salazar, Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Vilsack and Janet Napolitano? They were all lawyers without specific expertise in the issue areas of the departments they led. But each, having experience as elected Democratic statewide officials, knew enough about their respective issue areas that their status as non-experts never really mattered.
Perry spent 14 years governing what remains by far the largest energy-producing state in the union. That may not qualify him for an advanced degree in nuclear physics or combustion chemistry, but it does mean he understands how energy markets work.
That’s perhaps as much as one can hope for from the Department of Energy, for it is hardly the most vital of federal departments. Ironically, it is one that Perry himself promised to abolish when running for president in 2012.
We doubt that Perry will make himself the last secretary of energy, but his opinion that the department’s powers should be limited is something President-elect Trump’s team must have viewed as a plus when it selected him, and that is a positive sign.
There is one truly important task that we hope Perry can accomplish. One of the Energy Department’s few essential functions (which could easily be shifted to the Defense Department, by the way) is to safeguard and dispose of the nuclear waste produced by America’s commercial nuclear power plants. Utility companies across America paid $21 billion to the Energy Department for this appropriate government service, which the Energy Department has completely failed to perform.
Its failure, due to political sabotage, is both dangerous and expensive. The Yucca Mountain repository, in a deserted, uninhabitable section of Nevada, was supposed to begin taking in nuclear waste on New Year’s Day 1998, so that the material would not have to be stored in communities across the nation. Nineteen years and countless scientific studies later, Yucca is just a $15 billion hole in the ground, thanks mostly to ferocious opposition from the retiring Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid.
Reid also had a huge assist from the Obama administration, which broke federal law in attempting to close the site for good. Obama went so far as to designate national monuments strategically in areas through which the waste would have to travel by rail on the way to Yucca.
Every year Yucca Mountain fails to take in nuclear waste, taxpayers incur billions in additional penalties to the utilities whose waste the government is not taking as agreed upon. By one 2013 estimate, taxpayers could be on the hook for $50 billion in damages by 2020, on top of the construction costs already incurred.
That’s all thanks to Reid and Obama. Their simultaneous departure from Washington thus presents a golden opportunity for Perry to plug a large hole in the federal budget and remove dangerous nuclear waste from inhabited areas all over the nation.
We hope that Perry has the persistence and drive to accomplish this, and at the same time to establish a fitting memorial for one of America’s most memorable legislative leaders. Taxpayers deserve no less than to see the Harry Reid Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain become a reality, at long last.
