Nevada

Massive planned Vegas complex claims to be sustainable

If you're going to build a gigantically humongous casino/hotel/condo/shopping center megaplex in the middle of Las Vegas, you may as well do it green ... or as green as a project of this size could be in the middle of the desert during a drought.

Brought to you by MGM Mirage, the 18-million-square-foot, $5 billion project will reportedly seek an unspecified level of LEED certification and, The Globe and Mail reports, will be bigger than Times Square, Soho, and Rockefeller Center -- combined.

MGM's claims of "sustainability" are likely more hype than reality, at least in the classic sense of the word, but designers, I suppose, do deserve some measure of credit for going greener than the average megaplex.

Eco-design features are said to include use of reclaimed water, planting of green roofs, and construction of a central power plant to be located on-site (presumably powered by something cleaner than, say, coal). One of the least-hailed features of the complex, though, will be an attempt at some kind of urban density, as well as the creation of a multi-use area amid the sprawl of Las Vegas' strip.

So way to go, MGM! May you and your big-name architects inspire other developers large and small to aim for at least some shade of green.

The feds are backing nuclear power — in the name of the environment

It’s a long-held tenet of U.S. environmentalists that nuclear power is bad news. Critics argue that the clean-air benefits of nuclear reactors are far outweighed by the consequences of uranium mining and radioactive waste storage — not to mention the damage that could result from an accident at an atomic power station. Now more than […]

Down the Hatch

With the Senate poised to vote as early as today on a proposed nuclear waste disposal site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, two wavering lawmakers have agreed to support the site in exchange for a favor in their own state. Republican Sens. Robert Bennett and Orrin Hatch, both of Utah, met yesterday with Energy Secretary Spencer […]

Yucky Mountain

Fire on the Mountain

Enviros in Washington are apoplectic over what they fear will be a pre-Earth Day cave-in by the Clinton administration over mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia. This used to be a mountain. Photo: David Miller, www.mountaintopmining.org. Readers may recall this battle from last year’s appropriations season, when powerful Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) introduced a rider that […]