House passes budget for Yucca project

Benjamin Grove

Thursday, June 29, 2000 | 11:11 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- A bill that would allocate $413 million next year to continue work on a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain passed the House Wednesday.

The money is wrapped in a larger appropriations bill that budgets nearly $22 billion for energy and water projects nationwide. The Senate has not yet passed its version of the bill.

The bill has heightened election-year politicking in Nevada, widening the philosophical chasm between Nevada's two House members, Republican Jim Gibbons and Democrat Shelley Berkley.

Gibbons, with an eye on the heated race between Berkley and Republican Jon Porter, has taken a loud and symbolic stand against the entire energy and water bill because it contains money to develop Yucca as a waste repository. He was one of just 19 representatives who voted against the bill; 407 voted for it.

Republicans point out that Berkley supports the energy and water bill. She backs the bill because it contains money for various Nevada projects, including $20 million for continued work on flood control projects in Las Vegas, she said.

"I am opposed to money for Yucca Mountain and will continue to fight to get its budget down," Berkley stressed this week.

The bill also includes $2.5 million for Nevada to oversee the Department of Energy's Yucca project. Congress has not given the state that money in recent years, but Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn, a close Gibbons ally, personally lobbied Rep. Ron Packard, R-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Water Appropriations committee, for the money.

But Guinn's effort to get the oversight money in the bill doesn't change Gibbons' stance, he said. Like Berkley, Gibbons wants cash for Yucca oversight and for other water projects, but a vote for the energy and water bill is like a vote for Yucca, Gibbons said.

"I'm not about to send a message to my colleagues that Nevada is for sale at any price," Gibbons said this week. "This doesn't stop me from fighting to keep these other projects. This is an important statement for me to make, and I've made it consistently."

Scientists have spent about $7.8 billion studying Yucca Mountain to determine if it is safe to bury the nation's high-level radioactive waste there.

Congress in 1987 decided that the Nevada site was the best place to bury 77,000 tons of the material from nuclear power plants and defense operations, such as nuclear submarines. Congress, the president and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission still must give their final approval to the site.

The DOE plans to open the waste repository by 2010.