Nukes near?

Monday, March 20, 2000 | 11:15 a.m.

The House of Representatives this week will consider a controversial Senate bill that would bring nuclear waste to Nevada by 2007, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said in Las Vegas Sunday.

In town to raise money for state Sen. Jon Porter's race for the House seat held by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., Hastert said the nuclear waste bill would be considered in the House as soon as Wednesday.

The campaign between Berkley and Porter is being targeted by both Democrats and Republicans as one of the key races in the country for the control of Congress. Political heavyweights from both parties are expected to visit the state in support of the candidates.

Hastert confirmed the House would consider the Senate's version of the nuclear waste bill that could begin sending 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste to Nevada by 2007, before scientific studies at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, are complete. Congress targeted Yucca as the lone study site for a high-level nuclear waste repository in 1987. At the earliest, the government would open it to wastes in 2010.

The Illinois GOP leader repeated after Sunday's fund-raiser at the Stardust hotel-casino how valuable Porter of Boulder City would be for Nevada's "unique issues," despite the pending vote on temporary high-level nuclear waste storage.

Hastert took direct aim at incumbent Berkley over the waste issue, saying "Shelley Berkley has not done the job. She's voted twice to fund it."

Berkley lashed back at the characterization. "That is absurd," she said. "That is a deliberate attempt by the speaker of the House to distort my record, which has been nothing short of stellar on nuclear waste."

The measure Hastert referred to was a budget bill that included money for flood control after Southern Nevada's floods last July and August, research on alternative treatment of nuclear waste and extra money for testing nuclear weapons without detonations, she said.

"It was the Republican leadership who bundled those important issues with the study of the Yucca Mountain site," Berkley said. "If my opponent had lived in the district last year during those horrific floods, there is no way he or any other self-respecting representative of Nevada could have voted against flood control money."

Hastert, Berkley noted, has been trying to move nuclear waste stored at 14 reactors in Illinois to Nevada. Illinois has more operating nuclear power reactors than any other state.

Hastert received campaign contributions of $4,000 from nuclear energy interests and another $11,000 from electric utilities owning nuclear reactors in 1997 and 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog group.

The Senate passed the latest nuclear waste bill 64-34, two votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to overcome a threatened veto by President Clinton.

Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, who sponsored the bill, declared the issue dead for the year because of the veto threat.

The president has said he will veto the bill, because it would allow the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to set radiation standards for Yucca ground water instead of following the Environmental Protection Agency limit. The commission's proposed standards are less strict than the EPA's.

"We've never put the bill on the president's desk before," Hastert said. "We don't know what the president will do."