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Under pressure from all sides, Brown backtracks, says Yucca ‘should not be revived’ • Nevada Current

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Under pressure from all sides, Brown backtracks, says Yucca ‘should not be revived’ • Nevada Current


After weeks of taking heat from opponents and critics Democrat and Republican alike for expressing a willingness to bring nuclear waste to Nevada, Republican Senate candidate Sam Brown on Saturday said that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project should not be considered.

“Over the past month, I’ve invested time speaking with engineers and experts on Yucca Mountain. It is abundantly clear that the project is dead,” Brown said on social media Saturday.

“As I’ve said before, it should not, and will not, be revived as a nuclear waste repository,” Brown added. 

Brown’s campaign did not respond Saturday to a request to identify where and when he has said that before.

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His statement Saturday is in stark contrast to remarks he made in 2022 but that only came to light last month, in which Brown said not allowing nuclear waste in Nevada was “an incredible loss of revenue for our state.”

In a 2022 recording obtained and reported by the Los Angeles Times last month, when asked about Yucca Mountain at a campaign event, Brown said “one of the things I’m afraid of is a lack of understanding and the fearmongering that Harry Reid and others have spread,” and “that we could miss an incredible opportunity for revenue for our state in the future.”

“If we don’t act soon,” Brown added in those 2022 remarks, “other states like Texas and New Mexico, right now, are assessing whether or not they can essentially steal that opportunity from us. And at the end of the day, we all know Nevada could use another great source of revenue and it sure would be a shame if we didn’t monopolize on that and become a central hub of new development that we can do at Yucca.”

In a statement issued by Brown in response to the Times story, he did not specifically reassert support for bringing nuclear waste to Nevada, but said “I’m always interested in economic opportunities for Nevada that better diversify our economy.”

Ever since the so-called “Screw Nevada” bill passed by Congress in 1987 singling out the Yucca Mountain site northwest of Las Vegas to be studied as the nation’s nuclear waste facility, opposition from the Nevada public and the state’s politicians of both parties has been overwhelming.

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Since Brown’s 2022 statements became public, Sen. Jacky Rosen and multiple other Democrats have hammered Brown for expressing willingness to bring nuclear waste to Nevada.

And Jeff Gunter, Brown’s chief challenger for the Republican nomination to challenge Rosen in the general election, is airing an ad promising to block the Yucca project if elected to the Senate and blasting Brown’s willingness to “dump toxic nuclear waste here.”

Less than three weeks ago Brown responded to Rosen and Gunter’s attacks over Yucca by telling The Hill he is “not committed to supporting the opening of Yucca Mountain.

“However,” Brown added in that May 14 statement to The Hill, “I will consider all thoroughly vetted future proposals, with the safety of Nevadans being my top priority, while ensuring the proposals are substantially economically beneficial.” 

“Leadership means considering all economic opportunities that could better support the lives of Nevadans,” Brown added.

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That too is in contrast to his statement on social media Saturday, in which Brown said, “As Nevada’s next US Senator, I’ll stand with President Trump to oppose it.”

Trump’s opposition to dumping nuclear waste in Nevada was itself a reversal of position on the the former president’s part.

Yucca Mountain was officially designated as the nation’s nuclear waste “repository” during the administration of George W. Bush, in 2002. But the project was the subject of legal and regulatory proceedings for the next several years, until the administration of Barack Obama ordered the Department of Energy to discontinue its licensing application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and eliminated federal funding for the project.

While president, Trump attempted to restart funding for Yucca, but was thwarted by Congress. Trump reversed positions during the 2022 campaign cycle in an effort to help Adam Laxalt, the Republican who defeated Brown in the 2022 Senate primary but lost to Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in the general election. The Biden administration has never included funding for the Yucca Mountain project, and has assured Nevada officials that it has no plans to ever do so.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which includes a playbook for actions the influential organization suggests should be urgent priorities in a second Trump administration, calls for resuming and funding the Yucca Mountain licensing process.

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Nevada is protected—for now—from machine-gun ruling

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Nevada is protected—for now—from machine-gun ruling


LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Nevada residents won’t be receiving devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire at the rate of a fully automatic machine gun, thanks to a settlement worked out by the state’s lawyers.

But hundreds of other people across the country are eligible to receive so-called force reset triggers, under a lawsuit negotiated by the U.S. government and firearms manufacturers.

The move comes after an executive order from President Donald Trump prompted a review of the government’s regulation of firearms in general, and a reversal of the government’s position in two key cases.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by 16 states, including Nevada, seeks to ban forced reset triggers using the reasoning the federal government formerly employed in its own legal actions.

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“Especially coming from a state like Nevada, where we’ve experienced a mass shooting, we don’t want these forms of devices, predominantly because it’s against our law”, said Attorney General Aaron Ford. “But secondly, we have personal experience on these, what happens when these types of things are placed into the wrong hands.”

Fully automatic fire

A semi-automatic rifle, such as the Armalite Rifle 15, or AR-15, fires a single round every time the trigger is pressed. The trigger must be released for a new round to be inserted into the chamber.

But a forced reset trigger — sometimes called FRT — allows a weapon to fire rounds as long as the trigger is held down, similar to the operation of a military-style M4 or M16 rifle. In fully automatic mode, the weapon will continue firing until its magazine is empty.

The forced reset trigger is installed internally, and it may not be readily apparent to an observer that the weapon has been modified.

Fully automatic weapons are generally prohibited to civilians, as are devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire at fully automatic rates, under the National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986.

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Banned in Nevada

After the deadly 1 October shooting in 2017, the Nevada Legislature banned so-called bump stocks, which are devices affixed externally to a rifle’s stock that use the recoil of the rifle to achieve continuous fire.

The perpetrator of 1 October used rifles equipped with bump stocks to rain gunfire on a crowd at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip.

Under Nevada law, passed in 2019, it’s illegal to import, sell or possess any device that “…materially increases the rate of fire of the semi-automatic firearm or approximates the action or rate of fire of a machine gun.”

That language applies equally to bump stocks as well as forced reset triggers.

And the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco formerly took the view that forced reset triggers were devices that turned semi-automatic rifles into illegal machine guns. Starting in 1975, the ATF classified devices similar to forced reset triggers as machine gun devices.

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Changing stances

As of last summer, the ATF had taken possession of at least 11,884 forced reset trigger devices under its regulations and brought legal actions against their manufacturers.

In August 2023, however, gun rights groups and trigger makers sued the ATF, challenging the rules classifying the triggers as machine gun devices. A Texas federal judge agreed with the plaintiffs and ordered the AFT to stop enforcing its regulations and to return forced reset triggers to their previous owners, even in states where the law prohibited them, such as Nevada.

The government eventually said it would return the devices, but only in places where they were legal, an approach the gun makers objected to, saying the federal government could not be trusted with interpreting state laws.

On February 7, however, President Trump issued an executive order to protect Second Amendment rights, prompting a Justice Department review of all gun regulations. The AFT subsequently withdrew its lawsuits against the trigger makers and agreed to return all triggers previously seized from owners.

But lawyers representing Nevada and other states secured an agreement: no triggers would be returned to states where the law bans them. Ford said the deal would protect the state, at least temporarily, but that loopholes persist.

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“We have said that they will not be shipped to Nevada,” said Ford. “But our borders are porous, intrastate borders are porous, to be sure. So a gun that’s delivered to Utah, or an FRT that’s delivered to Utah may very well find its way across the border into Mesquite or something. At the end of the day, these are very real issues that we have to address.”

Ford said he would make enforcement of gun laws — including possession or use of forced reset triggers — a priority for his office.

“It’s one of the highest levels of priority, because I’ve always supported common-sense gun safety measures that are going to keep the public safe, and that’s what this is about.”

That’s why Nevada is continuing as a plaintiff in the case State of New Jersey v. Bondi, which asks a court to find that the ATF’s old viewpoint — that forced reset triggers create machine guns out of regular semi-automatic rifles — is the law, and thus ban them nationwide.





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Travis and Jason Kelce Spotted on Late-Night Casino Run in Nevada

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Travis and Jason Kelce Spotted on Late-Night Casino Run in Nevada


Travis & Jason Kelce
We Knew When to Fold Them …
2 AM Is the Perfect Time!!!

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‘Gothic Fire’ burns more that 30K acres in Nye County

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‘Gothic Fire’ burns more that 30K acres in Nye County




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‘Gothic Fire’ burns more that 30K acres | Local Nevada | Local
















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