State officials, pleased by Senate vote on Yucca bill, shift focus to House

Benjamin Grove

Friday, Feb. 11, 2000 | 11:18 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada's two House members are bracing for debate should it come this year on a nuclear waste bill that would bring the nation's highly radioactive nuclear waste to Nevada.

The Senate passed its version of the bill 64-34 Thursday, although President Clinton threatened a veto and 34 Senate votes would sustain it.

So with the Senate version likely doomed for the year, it's questionable whether the House would bother tackling the issue until a new president is elected.

"There have been no discussions that I have heard on whether this bill will be taken up," said Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev. "Certainly, I see it as not being a productive use of time."

The House and Senate bills greatly differ. The Senate bill establishes guidelines for shipping 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste, now stored at defense centers and commercial nuclear power plants nationwide, to Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The waste would be permanently buried in the mountain.

A House bill as it stands allows nuclear waste to be temporarily stored at the Nevada Test Site, roughly 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Republican-controlled House also could simply vote on the Senate version of the bill.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., spoke Thursday with Minority leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., who pledged to fight a bill should it come to the House floor, Berkley spokesman Richard Urey said.

"How much appetite there is to move this bill, whether they would do anything with it, remains to be seen," Urey said.

Reaction came swiftly to Thursday's Senate vote, considered a victory by Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid, both D-Nev., who fought the bill.

Gov. Kenny Guinn was "proud and pleased" and will now turn his attention to the House, spokesman Jack Finn said.

"We're encouraged by the fact that we have maintained enough votes to sustain a veto," Finn said. "Suffice to say, he's watching the situation closely."

Nevada's Yucca pointman said state officials were relieved that the Senate bill seemed dead for now.

"For six years in a row, they have tried to force bad legislation to essentially make Yucca Mountain work and abrogate health and safety standards, and common sense has prevailed," said Bob Loux, Executive Director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects, which oversees the Department of Energy's Yucca studies.

Loux keeps tabs on the DOE, which has been studying Yucca Mountain to determine whether it is a suitable site for storing waste. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission ultimately will approve or deny the Yucca proposal.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson did not support the Senate bill, much in part because it did not allow the DOE to pay for monitoring the waste as it now sits at power plants across the country.

Richardson saw the monitoring as a way to deal with mounting lawsuits filed by power plants against the DOE because the government had promised to haul waste to Yucca by 1998.

"While we negotiated in good faith with the Congress, I regret we were unable to reach agreement," Richardson said in a statement released Thursday.

"There were just too many unresolved issues. The bill contained unachievable milestones for moving spent fuel to Nevada, and it did not include my take-title proposal, which offered a promising near-term solution to address our contractual obligation to utilities."

Richardson, who was in Las Vegas this morning, also said the "toothless" radiation standards outlined by the bill have been weakened so badly that they pose a threat to Nevada.

"We want Nevadans to be protected under the standard. I will recommend a veto to the president. President Clinton and Vice President Gore are responsible for the vote yesterday," Richardson said.

"For Nevadans it gives them a really short shrift."

Several environmental groups cheered Thursday's vote.

"Nevada can breathe a little bit easier for a while," said Wenonah Hauter, who closely follows nuclear waste issues for Public Citizen, a Washington-based group founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

"We consider this a victory because the nuclear industry is basically buying votes through all their campaign contributions and the enormous amount of money they spend on lobbying.

"The outcome of the election in November will be important to the outcome of this bill," Hauter said. The leader of another Washington environmental group said the House was unlikely to debate the issue until a new president takes office.

"I think they would be wasting their time," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

Lobbyists for nuclear power plant operators vowed to battle on, even "in the absence of White House leadership."

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said during debate Thursday that the Yucca project has never received enough funding for the DOE to finish its work.

Each year Congress sets a budget for site work. Last year a compromise spending bill cut $30 million from Yucca's budget.

In addition, Murkowski's bill, Bingaman said, set unreasonable deadlines for the project. If the waste moves to Yucca in 2007, no repository will be ready. At the earliest, the DOE said, the site could accept waste by 2010.

If the Senate bill ever became law, DOE's Nevada office of the Yucca Mountain Project has no idea what would happen to the waste, spokesman Allen Benson said.

The Yucca site is a construction project with heavy equipment and many workers going in and out of the tunnel each day to continue scientific studies. In addition to work in the mountain, storage areas would have to be constructed.

After state Engineer Mike Turnipseed turned down the DOE's request for 430 acre feet of water to build and operate any repository, the government faces another challenge in building anything.

First, the DOE has to settle the water issue, Benson said. The DOE may have to truck water to the site from out of state, he said.

"Then we will worry about temporary storage," he said.

Sun reporter Mary Manning contributed to this report.