Nuclear bill gets Senate panel’s OK

Thursday, March 13, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved a bill today to create a temporary nuclear waste dump, possibly in Nevada.

The measure, approved on a 15-5 vote, now goes to the full Senate for consideration, possibly before a congressional recess later this month.

"We're not surprised by the approval," said Susan McCue, press secretary for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "We've never ben able to dissuade committee passage. We've always kept focused on the floor vote. We remain confident we have the votes to sustain a veto."

President Clinton has said repeatedly that he will veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

McCue said Reid is keeping his options open on how to fight the bill, and did not rule out a filibuster.

Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., stalled debate on the bill Wednesday with a procedural move, but he couldn't stop today's vote. Still, the fight is not over.

"Nevada is being run over roughshod," Bryan said. "We're not going to make this easy for them."

Nuclear power companies now store used fuel rods in concrete casts at their plants. Nuclear utilities say they're running short of storage space. Twenty-six of the 110 commercial nuclear reactors in the United States will run out of storage space by 1998, and 80 or so could be full by 2010, the Nuclear Energy Institute says.

What's more, a federal appeals court ruled that the Energy Department must start taking delivery of some spent fuel from companies by January.

That's why the industry is pushing the government to create a temporary dump site pending completion in 2010 of a permanent facility at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Last year, the Senate passed a measure that would have created a temporary storage site in Nevada, but the bill never came to a vote in the House because Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed to wait until after the November election.

This year's measure leaves it to the president to designate where the temporary storage dump would be put, and if he doesn't, it would be located in Nevada. The House has not yet taken up a version of its own.

Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, said he'll work to move this bill ahead. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., will introduce amendments seeking to scale back the amount of waste that could be stored at the temporary site.

Many lawmakers are under pressure to ensure that the dump won't be located in their states. The committee measure already excludes Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state as a potential site.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, succeeded in adding an amendment that requires the government to set aside at least 5 percent of the interim depot's capacity each year for military waste.

The move would guarantee room at the interim site for waste now stored in Idaho. More than 260 metric tons of spent fuel from government sources are stored at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory near Idaho Falls.

Federico Pena, Clinton's new Energy secretary, said last month the government couldn't meet its January deadline for starting to store some nuclear waste.

A coalition of utilities led by Northern States Power Co. is suing the government, arguing that they shouldn't have to pay into the fund for waste disposal if the government doesn't meet its obligations. Nuclear plant owners have paid $12 billion into the fund since it was created in 1982.

Meanwhile, safety concerns may be heightened by a fire and explosion in one of Japan's nuclear waste-processing plants. At least 37 people were exposed to "small amounts" of radioactive material, company officials said, though no injuries were reported.