I love high-level nuclear waste and want some in my yard

I really hate to disagree with you, but I think the situation in Nevada is more complicated than your summary. I personally would like to have some spent fuel in my back yard under my deck and some recently discharged spent fuel under my driveway. But I don't live in Nevada. A politician in Nevada can choose to be either for or against the disposal of nuclear waste in Nevada. Suppose that she could not care less personally one way or the other. Now she has to decide what her position will be based on a tedious review of the science and engineering issues followed by presenting (or defending) that decision to what is an overwhelmingly ignorant electorate. As an alternative to (or in combination with) the first method, she can use the vastly easier and commonly used alternative of seeing which way the political wind is blowing. Most of the relatively small group of people who know they will benefit economically from the project are not yet even in Nevada. So their wind is relatively weak. A slightly larger group of people who worship at the altar of anti-nukism blow their wind very hard. They also try to get anyone with a pulse to try and blow with them and are willing to emphatically tell those people just about anything to convince them. The vast majority of people who will vote for (or against) her know very little about the project, but they are a bit uneasy about anything "nuclear" and they know they don't like "waste"; after all, waste is what each one of them gets rid of because they don't want it, or don't like it, or because it is just nasty, dirty or stinks. They also know that many people have said that fallout (is that waste or something you would want to keep; I think it must be waste) from nuclear bombs caused some cancer in Nevada and that the government paid some money to some of the people who had cancer. So someone comes up to them and says: "We are going to put somebody else's nuclear waste in your state and leave it there forever, but don't worry because we are going to spend billions of dollars to keep it away from people. We would like you to be happy about it but we are going to put it there whether you like it or not because not many people live in your state and nobody else wants it." Now, bear in mind that they hear that from the people who are pushing the project, people who are not from Nevada. Bear in mind also that in politics and journalism "radioactive" and "nuclear waste" are words that are used to describe things that should not be touched, things that don't have anything to do with nuclear reactions, things like campaign contributions from Enron and from people who turn out to be convicted later of sexually molesting many children.

Also bear in mind that the politician actually probably has a mindset similar to the majority of people who live in Nevada. Based on that, I can't imagine how any sane Nevada politician would come out in favor of putting out-of-state, high-level nuclear waste in Nevada. Now once she has decided against it she will have to run against another Nevada politician who has decided against it for the same reason. She knows that and has to worry about her opponent accusing her of being soft on nuclear waste. So she begins to point out that those who want to put that horrible nuclear waste in Nevada are the spawn of the devil and she will fight a holy war to keep them and their damn waste out of her beautiful, unspoiled Nevada. So the folks who were just uneasy in the first place now have the anti-nukes and their political "leaders" competing with each other to tell them how bad nuclear waste is. So which way do you think all those folks are going to head when somebody tells them to pick sides?