Environmentalists should be outraged at President Obama’s latest move — instead, they’re celebrating it.

“A historic expanse of land about two hours from Las Vegas is getting a new title: national monument,” the Las Vegas Sun reported last week. “In a White House announcement late Thursday, President Barack Obama announced the designation of three new national monuments including the Basin and Range National Monument in Nevada, about 700,000 acres of public land with wildlife, petroglyphs and a large land-art project.”

Here’s why that’s a problem — it cuts off access to Yucca Mountain.

“President Barack Obama’s designation Friday of a portion of rural Nevada as a national monument apparently creates a roadblock for a nuclear dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain,” the Sun reported later. “’This is the final nail in the coffin,’ said Robert Halstead, executive director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects, regarding the Energy Department’s plans to transport waste from Caliente to the dump via railroad.”

Let’s be clear. Nuclear energy is the only truly carbon-free form of energy, and it’s proven to be reliable — unlike wind and solar. Right now it’s only limited by government regulations, and the lack of a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste. That’s why the Department of Energy has spent billions developing Yucca Mountain.

And a recent study shows that Yucca Mountain is the safest option for long-term storage.

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission … released a long-delayed report on the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a disposal spot for nuclear waste, finding that the design met the commission’s requirements, laying the groundwork to restart the project if control of the Senate changes hands in the elections next month,” the New York Times reported last year.

What is Yucca Mountain? It’s the best and safest storage facility imaginable for nuclear waste. The federal government already has spent more than $15 billion on the site over the last three decades.

A 1995 National Academy of Sciences report concluded underground storage is safe, and also that governments must act quickly to alleviate the accumulating waste in above-ground temporary storage facilities.

And a U.S. Department of Energy study had similar findings that nuclear waste could be safely stored at the Yucca Mountain site.

Joe Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the DOE report on years of scientific study offers further support of the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for used fuel from the nation’s commercial nuclear power plants and high level radioactive waste from the nation’s defense programs.

But this move by the Obama administration throws up yet another roadblock. That’s a shame, because all the green energy projects funded by the federal government have yielded little. A few places in the United States incorporate some wind or some solar energy into the power grid, but only nuclear energy has proven itself as a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

Obama says he’s using his power to designate national monuments to preserve the environment. But he’s doing precisely the opposite.