To start, a confession: I’ve never been a fan of “The Walking Dead.”

 The wildly successful show has shotgunned its way into the heart of American pop culture. It’s been taken seriously by artists and academics.

 But, you know, Zombies just aren’t my thing. I’ve never found watching the undead get pulverized time after time, only to return for more, overly entertaining. A little queasy, but not much amused.

 I was left with a similar sensation recently after watching an Internet feed of the recent environmental subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee as it met to chew on a draft of the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, which would effectively restart the licensing process for Nevada’s Yucca Mountain project.

 You remember Yucca Mountain: It’s the manmade hole in the ground into which the Department of Energy has poured more than $30 billion in ratepayer and taxpayer dollars after strong-arming it as the nation’s only high-level, permanent nuclear waste repository.

 The three-decade-old project was effectively mothballed during eight years of the Obama administration thanks in large part to the political alliance between the President and U.S. Sen. Harry Reid. In that time Reid assured allies and enemies alike that Yucca was a rotting corpse. Dead, dead, dead.

 And then came November’s election of billionaire pitchman Donald Trump and a deregulation and pro-business environment that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who knows plenty about power politics and the clout of the nuclear energy industry, toured Yucca Mountain in a glorified photo-op early this year just days after the Texas Attorney General sued the federal government to restart the project.

 The members of Nevada’s anti-Yucca delegation are justified in feeling a sense of genuine alarm. Fast forward to that late-April subcommittee committee meeting, which found Rep. Dina Titus as usual leading the sparring session and fellow House Democrats Jacky Rosen and Ruben Kihuen registering strong objections, and embattled U.S. Sen. Dean Heller calling out Perry.

 Like an overmatched prizefighter, Nevada has learned to hold and elbow and land low blows in its long fight against the DOE and some of Washington’s most powerful influences. Whether it’s the refusal of the state engineer to issue a well permit for water to be used to cool a core drilling rig, or the tangle geological questions, a draw has been as good as a knockout so far.

 But the odds appear to be shifting. Although the $120 million in funding for the DOE and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing process wasn’t included in the latest federal spending bill, the argument for pressing forward with what even the project’s staunch proponents consider a 2-to-4-year process is getting louder. The litigation alone includes more than 200 objections and contentions, according to the NRC.

 Then there’s the bottom line: The long battle has burned a mountain of cash. Anthony O’Donnell, Chairman of the Nuclear Issues Subcommittee of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commission (NARUC) places the cost to ratepayers and taxpayers, including accrued interest, at more than $40 billion.

 In words that must have brought smiles to Nevada’s anti-Yucca faction, if few others, O’Donnell told the House subcommittee, “Today we have virtually nothing, repeat nothing, to show for this substantial tax on nuclear generated electricity. In fact, the collection of the fee for the federal nuclear waste program is the only component of the program that has ever worked as intended.”

 And that doesn’t begin to answer the transportation questions.

 As one witness observed, “When you have high-level waste at 121 sites and 39 different states, it doesn’t matter whether you have local consent or not if you’re not able to get the material there. Which means that any consent across those various political boundaries is going to be a challenge without some kind of clear federal direction on their ability to direct that transportation to occur.”

 Now that the nuclear waste Zombies are gearing up in Washington for a long march to the middle of the desert, Nevadans shouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find this once-dead issue fast-tracked once more.

 John L. Smith is a longtime Las Vegas journalist and author. Contact him at [email protected]. On Twitter: @jlnevadasmith.