I once worked for a CEO that pronounced "year" as "yeah". I loved it. Every meeting felt like a pep rally because it was sprinkled with phrases like "we've got four yeahs" and "we worked all yeah on this".
But I recall reading that this is a deliberate affect used by those who work with nuclear material. Partly as a shibboleth, partly as a means of making the word easier to say quickly.
It came up because George W Bush would pronounce it “nucular” and that was given as the reason. All if my memory serves that is.
I’d bet that they love the foilage in fall, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular
But it's not something to be horrified by; it's no different from how we commonly pronounce "February" without the first "r", or "government" without the "n", or "Wednesday" flipping the "dne" to "nd".
What's even more interesting is that it's only in the context of weapons/energy. The same person will say "nuclear family" the way it's spelled.
But in the weapons/energy context, it's just a natural re-use of the suffix in "moleCULAR", "oCULAR", "cirCULAR". Technically wrong in terms of its derivation, but it feels entirely natural to say, and requires less tongue movement.
It's not due to a lack of education or anything. It's more like a regional dialect, where the region is nuclear weapons and energy.
I've never heard it as anything but Wends-day, but maybe everyone else is wrong.
Off the cuff I can picture some Australians taking it more nasally at the top of the palate sort of yee-ah (think Steve Irwin), a more neutral yeehr with a hint of final r (but more clipped and mono syllable than an American accent), or even a yair that might push as far as yuhhh (heading towards a sort of hybrid of Californian Valley Girl and the posh British accent used in American media).
Bit of an exploration of the evoking Australian accent here: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103321146