YUCCA MOUNTAIN (KTNV) — For Nevada, it's the question that doesn't go away.
The fight to stop Yucca Mountain from becoming a nuclear waste repository has gone on for more than three decades now. Despite an official halt to the project in 2010, that fight continues for Nevada's Congressional delegation and the Western Shoshone people.
For the Western Shoshone, it's a cause large than themselves — a calling to preserve their identity for generations to come.
"For the Shoshone people, our identity is the land," said Ian Zabarte, principal man of the Shoshone Nations. "We developed our language in relation to the land — to be able to talk about it, to be able to share it."
For decades, those ties have been threatened by the radioactive fallout of nuclear testing.
"You used to be able to drink the water from any of the springs around you," Zabarte said. "Now, you can't do that any more because of the pollution."
One hundred miles northwest of the bright lights of Las Vegas, miles past Mercury, Nevada, sits Yucca Mountain — a 60-million-acre formation made up of mostly fractured volcanic tuffs.
It's almost home to the Western Shoshone Nation people — a home Zabarte says he hopes to see restored to its most natural form within his lifetime.
"Some of the big pollution is radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons testing," Zabarte said. "We cannot just pick up and leave in the event of the radiation, the fallout — we lose our identity."
Zabarte has spent his life on the front lines of the fight to keep nuclear waste out of his ancestral home.
"We would walk all the way across the valley to the main gate at the Nevada Test Site doors and have our protests there," Zabarte said. "I received a letter in 2001 that said I'm at ricks of developing silicosis because of the number of hours I spent underground at Yucca Mountain."
While the U.S. no longer performs nuclear testing, nuclear advances continue, and questions about what happens to the nation's nuclear waste remain.
"After testing, Nevada was angry enough about what had happened because of nuclear weapons testing that it said, 'Never again. We're not going to be the high-level waste dump for this country,'" said Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist.
Kamps has walked alongside the Shoshone Nation people for decades in protest of nuclear testing and the proposed repository that would have sat roughly 1,000 feet under Yucca Mountain.
"What happened in our state was Nevada never had consent, and in 1982, when the bill was passed that designated Nevada as the nation's nuclear storage waste disposal area, that didn't come with any of our consent," said Rep. Susie Lee, a Democrat representing Nevada's 3rd Congressional District.
The late U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spent his career leading the battle against the project, which began in the 1980s, during President Ronald Reagan's administration.
President Barack Obama called the Yucca Mountain project "unworkable" in 2010 and made good on his campaign promise to Nevadans to end it and cut funding for the project.
"This was a political cartoon that ran in the Las Vegas Review-Journal back in 2010, and it really celebrated the end of the Yucca Mountain Project, this attempt by the U.S. government to attempt to dump all the country's high radioactive waste here in Nevada," Kamps said.
Ten years later, President Donald Trump — a supporter of nuclear energy — initially called for the licensing process of Yucca Mountain to restart. But in 2020, Trump announced that he would reverse his policy and halted his support of the project.
Today, the question still remains: Where should the nation's nuclear waste be stored? It's a near-constant fight for members of Nevada's congressional delegation to this day.
"The fact of the matter is, there are 27 states that have nuclear waste, spent fuel from nuclear reactors, and those states want a solution," Lee said.
Lee says the bipartisan position from Nevada lawmakers is clear: Nevadans don't want to see any funding go back into the Yucca Mountain project.
"There will need to be a long-term solution for this," she said. "I'm working with my counterparts to try and come up with a solution, how we can reprocess that waste, but most importantly, how and where it can be put where there is consent."
For the Shoshone Nation lineage, the Yucca Mountain fight goes beyond politics. Its members say it's a race to preserve what's left of the mountain to leave behind for future generations.
"They say that we are as naive as Native Americans because of our holistic conservation of the land for future generations," Zabarte said. "They don't see that as value, that the land is somehow being wasted.
"We're trying to protect this land so our future generations can live a good quality of life," he said.