Before the 2018 midterm elections, Senator Dean Heller stood with President Trump in the glittering Trump International Hotel near the Las Vegas Strip, looking out from the top floor, and pointed.

“I said, ‘See those railroad tracks?’” Mr. Heller, a Nevada Republican who lost his seat later that year, recalled in an interview. Nuclear waste to be carted to Yucca Mountain for permanent storage would have to travel along the tracks, within a half-mile of the hotel, Mr. Heller said.

“I think he calculated pretty quickly what that meant,” Mr. Heller said. “I think it all made sense. There was a moment of reflection, of, ‘Oh, OK.’”

Whether the waste would have traveled along those particular tracks is a subject of debate. But the conversation appears to have helped focus Mr. Trump, who in recent weeks seemed to end his administration’s support for moving nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, a proposal that had been embraced by his appointees for three years despite his own lack of interest. (emphasis added)

It should be clarified that currently there are no other railroad tracks to deliver high-level radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain -- Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians' land -- than those very railroad tracks. To build a bypass around Las Vegas would cost several billion dollars (with a B!), as some 15 mountain ranges would have to be crossed. It would be the largest rail construction project in the U.S. in many decades, perhaps even in nearly a century.