We had chance to diversify

In response to your Thursday editorial on economic diversification:

We sure missed a great opportunity to diversify the Southern Nevada economy when we chased away the Yucca Mountain Project. I wonder how many residents realize that we literally terminated 2,000 high-paying (average $100,000-a-year) jobs?

Most of these workers were highly educated engineers and scientists, and 95 percent of them have left Nevada. Do people realize that the project payroll would have grown to several times that size and remained here for more than 50 years?

Scare tactics were used by our politicians to distort and exaggerate the risks from nuclear technology to create a bogeyman to save us from.

So farewell to Yucca Mountain and the tens of billions of dollars it could have brought to Nevada. I’m sure we can find some other way to diversify our economy, improve our educational system and attainment, and provide thousands of union jobs for decades.

Or can we?

Ernest Hardin

Las Vegas

Talk, talk

To the editor:

In her Friday letter, Kathleen Stone argued that “the people are tired of politics as usual. We want change.” Then she castigates Sen. Harry Reid for trying to change the Senate’s procedures for filibusters, which have pretty much locked up that chamber.

What she fails to note is that the filibuster will not be done away with. Instead, the current procedures for using it will be changed.

For now, threatening to filibuster has been enough to block legislation. Nobody stands up and talks for hours, they just threaten to do so.

That isn’t what the writers of the Constitution intended. They wanted a filibuster to be real, and it had been real and seldom used until this procedure was put in place.

Glen Kaner

Las Vegas