In a shift, Sam Brown, who seeks the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), on Saturday said he opposed storing radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain.
Yucca Mountain “should not, and will not, be revived as a nuclear waste repository,” reads a post dated May 25 on Brown’s account at the website X. “As Nevada’s next US Senator, I’ll stand with President Trump to oppose it.”
Like Trump, Brown was for Yucca, or at least not against it, until he was against it.
At a luncheon in 2022, Brown said that Nevada would lose out on revenue if it failed to develop Yucca and another state swooped in to “steal that opportunity from us,” according to an April report by the Los Angeles Times, which obtained a recording of Brown’s remarks.
Since 2022, Brown has moderated his stance on Yucca, though it was not until the U.S. Memorial Day holiday weekend that he fell in line with most mainstream Nevada politicians to oppose creating a permanent radioactive waste repository at the mountain.
Since the April report in the LA Times, Brown’s campaign has been criticized by Democrats in Nevada, some of whom said that his unwillingness to unequivocally oppose Yucca made him unsuitable to hold office in the Silver State.
In mid-May, citing its own polling, Brown’s campaign told the Nevada Independent that Brown leads his next-closest rival for the GOP nomination by 38 points.
However, multiple polls conducted this spring show Rosen with a comfortable lead over Brown in the general election, according to the website 538, which aggregates poll results for upcoming U.S. elections.
