The Challenge
In late April 2002, shortly after Governor Guinn announced his veto of Yucca Mountain becoming the nation's designated nuclear waste depository, IDI was approached to create and execute a large issue management campaign. With this campaign, IDI had to highlight the numerous inherent safety problems with the Yucca facility, and the dangers associated with transporting vast amounts of nuclear waste to and from the facility.

IDI’s Solution
To accomplish this mission, IDI needed to work with a variety of conflicting constituent groups to mobilize national, regional, state, and local actions.

IDI created and managed a wide-ranged multifaceted campaign that:

• Recruited over 30,000 supporters that delivered approximately 7,000 personal phone calls and over 11,000 faxes to undecided Senators. 
• Partnered with Environmental organizations to generate support in targeted states.
• Designed, developed, and maintained the nuclearneighborhoods.org web site.
• Created Flash animations used to recruit people to the nuclearneighborhoods.org web site and coordinated online advertising.
• Managed phone-bank operations. Over 7,500 calls were made to Senators from these combined phone operations.
• Hundreds of contacts such as phone calls, letter, opinion editorials, and letters to the editor from "community leaders" were delivered to the targeted Senators.
• Over 500 editorial packages were sent out, 200 phone calls were made to editorial boards, and an estimated 100 op-ed placements were placed from their activities.

The Results
Although the Senate ultimately passed the resolution authorizing Yucca Mountain, the vote was much closer than expected. The final roll call reflected IDI’s wide range of work over a very short period of time and made, what was considered an easy win for proponents of Yucca, to be a very hard fought battle that was nearly defeated.

Services Provided

• Strategic Alliances
• Media Relations
• Internet Communications
• Issues Management