LAST CALL: Take One for the Team
Schulz, Max
1 LAST CALL MAX SCHULZ Take One for the Team N RECENT YEARS NEVADA POLITICOS LIKE Governor Kenny Guinn, Congresswoman ShelleyBerkley, and Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign, along with the...
...Until the follow-up...
...It was an eminently reasonable, even courageous, position to take...
...According to a 2005 PBS feature on Las Vegas, the Sands Hotel and Casino even held an annual Miss Atomic Beauty contest...
...But in so doing, Miss Wosik provided a valuable service, suggesting the fissures that might exist in the state's supposedly unified resistance to filling Yucca Mountain with nearly 80,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel...
...I told him it was not far from Las Vegas...
...Every self-respecting Nevadan, it seems, naturally must be against Yucca...
...Bucking the trend established by just about every major elected official in the state, Miss Nevada replied that the waste must go somewhere, and Yucca Mountain appeared to be the best place in the country for it...
...1 LAST CALL MAX SCHULZ Take One for the Team N RECENT YEARS NEVADA POLITICOS LIKE Governor Kenny Guinn, Congresswoman ShelleyBerkley, and Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign, along with the major newspapers, have proclaimed the Silver State's united o p p o s i t i o n to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository about an hour and a half out of Las Vegas...
...The politicians are making hay over it," a cocktail waitress at the low-rent Barbary Coast noted...
...But I don't think it's much of a problem...
...According to the Beno Gazette Journal, Miss Wosik was asked during the interview session (which did not air on television) her opinion of the controversial plan to store the nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain...
...Others I asked could identify the Yucca Mountain controversy, but nobody seemed too upset over the possibility the repository might get built...
...Yucca Mountain...
...Before the moratorium on nuclear testing was instituted in 1992, more than 1,000 nuclear detonations were conducted there...
...I had Crystal's Yucca Mountain apostasy in mind during a trip to Las Vegas conducted just two weeks after the Miss America pageant...
...I had queried her as she brought me an early morning drink...
...In a bid to breathe some life into the dying Miss America spectacle, pageant organizers moved the event out of Atlantic City for the first since in its 85-year history...
...Searching for better ratings, they traded the rundown squalor of a Jersey shore boardwalk for the glitz and glitter of the Vegas strip...
...It seems that Reid and Co...
...Now that's a pageant Crystal Wosik should win hands down...
...They were bona fide tourist attractions...
...She was her state's proud representative to January's Miss America pageant, which took place, coincidentally, in Las Vegas...
...overlooked a free thinker named Crystal Wosik...
...Max Schulz is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute...
...Perhaps that is not surprising...
...For years Nevada-and Las Vegas in particular--played up its role as ground zero of the nation's nuclear weapons efforts...
...They asked what if something terrible happened, some sort of catastrophe where people died...
...Having long known what the state's political establishment had to say about the matter, I was curious what the average Las Vegan--if there is such a thing--thought about Yucca...
...asked ablackjack dealer at the Bellagio in response to my inquiry...
...Such selflessness and generosity of spirit helped ensure Crystal would not be not crowned Miss America...
...Miss Wosik is better known as Miss Nevada...
...Take one for the team indeed...
...Most took place at the government's test site near Las Vegas...
...So important was the atom bomb to defining Las Vegas that in 1958 Clark County incorporated a mushroom cloud into its seal...
...The pageant Savonarolas pounced...
...Her candor earned a big tip...
...I f my limited sampling is any indication, the answer is not much at all...
...Miss Atomic Beauty...
...My admittedly unscientific survey netted not one person who could be described as being exercised over Yucca...
...During the 1950s, the Nevada Test Site averaged an aboveground explosion every five weeks...
...Casinos ferried high rollers out in early morning limousine rides to watch the mushroom clouds tower over the landscape...
...82 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2006...
...The scientists will bury that stuffpretty deep...
...About 100 of these were atmospheric tests...
...So she went down in flames...
...the rest were detonated underground, leaving an eerie set of pockmarks along the desert floor...
...Well, she reportedly replied, sometimes you "just have to take one for the team...
...He said he had only been in Sin City for a year...
...Well, maybe not everyone...
...That's in Idaho, right...
Vol. 39 • March 2006 • No. 2
