Alaska senator pushes DOE to move on nuclear waste

Friday, Jan. 21, 2000 | 10:23 a.m.

Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, has asked Department of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to meet with him to negotiate the controversial issue of temporary storage of highly radioactive waste while Yucca Mountain is under study.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Murkowski's letter sent on Wednesday could delay a vote on temporary nuclear waste storage and strengthen President Clinton's threatened veto of temporary storage.

"I think it's really good news," Reid said. "He realizes that he doesn't have the votes to push this through," overriding the veto.

But Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., through spokesman David Lemmon, said it is the same rhetoric from Murkowski.

"They're worried and they're desperate," Lemmon said of lawmakers supporting nuclear waste storage in Nevada. "They know they don't have the votes to override the veto."

Another attempt at temporary nuclear waste storage at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is expected after Congress returns on Monday. Last year Murkowski and his Republican colleagues led the effort to put the high-level nuclear wastes stored at 73 commercial nuclear reactors across the nation at the Nevada Test Site.

Blocked by Reid and Bryan, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., kept Murkowski's bill from surfacing as budget negotiations bogged down the end of the congressional session.

Republican lawmakers said they want to meet with Richardson before the Senate renews the nuclear waste debate in Murkowski's Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Although there has been no date set for a meeting, Richardson responded to Murkowski on Thursday, saying he "takes exception" to the characterization that the DOE has failed to meet its obligations on nuclear waste.

The DOE, Richardson said, still has studies under way at Yucca Mountain and will be ready to determine the site's future in 2001. "The administration has consistently disagreed with Congress on temporary storage in Nevada," the secretary said.

In 1999 Richardson offered to take responsibility for the nuclear wastes at the reactor sites while the Yucca studies continued. The DOE plans to continue discussing this option with the utilities, he said.

Temporary nuclear waste proposals have been stymied for the past six years by presidential veto threat. Clinton said last year he would not support Murkowski's bill because it allows the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to set radiation exposure standards instead of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has regulatory authority by law. The NRC must license any high-level nuclear repository.

Republicans have castigated the DOE's failure to take the nuclear wastes by 1998, a deadline set by Congress in 1982.

"Despite having personally requested numerous times that the administration offer legislation to meet its obligations to consumers, the administration has failed to do so," Murkowski said in his letter to Richardson.

Noting that Ivan Itkin has been confirmed as the director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, the agency should be ready to propose a plan for moving nuclear waste, Murkowski said.

"As the president has granted you the full portfolio and authority to address the area, I look forward to meeting with you early in the new year to discuss how we can accomplish this goal in 2000," Murkowski wrote.