Berkley says House short of anti-nuke votes

Tuesday, March 16, 1999 | 10:42 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Nevada probably will not be able to garner the 147 votes in the House needed to sustain a promised veto by President Clinton on a bill to ship nuclear waste to an interim dump at the Nevada Test Site, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said Monday.

She told a news conference she does not see gathering enough veto-proof votes "unless (Rep.) Jim Gibbons can make good on his promise of changing 24 Republican votes, which I think he will have a very hard time doing when his speaker and the chairman of the House Commerce Committee are the ones advocating this in the strongest possible way."

The bill is scheduled for hearing next month in the House. Berkley spoke about the issue both to a joint session of the Nevada Legislature and later at a news conference.

She said she has worked on freshmen Democrats and female lawmakers to get them to support Nevada on the issue. "But one-on-one conversations and 'dear colleague' letters cannot compare to the nuclear industry's relentless push for this legislation."

Every weekend on her trips home, other members of Congress are on the plane as guests of the nuclear industry, she said. "They come to Las Vegas and after a lovely evening at a posh hotel they are helicoptered out to Yucca Mountain."

While Nevadans think about contamination of ground water, fault lines and volcanic activity, she said, "pro-nuclear congressmen fly over Yucca Mountain (and) they think of it as nothing more than a desolate donicker (cesspool) where they can discard their waste."

At a "nuclear summit" called by Gov. Kenny Guinn last month, Berkley and Gibbons promised to pull out all stops to gain 147 votes, the amount needed to sustain a veto by the president. Last year, there were 123 opponents to the interim storage dump bill. The veto was ultimately sustained in the Senate and the bill was stopped.

The strategy this year was to get a veto-proof vote in the House so the Senate would not even consider the legislation.

"My side's easy," Berkley said. "I've got the leader of the Democratic Party in my corner."

But Republicans control the House.

She said the state must spend money spreading the word across the nation about the dangers of nuclear waste being transported through the states.

She said the public should be inspired "to get hold of their elected officials that they don't want this waste going through their district."

The state has never put up money for such a fight, but she added, "We have everything to gain and nothing to lose."