Nuclear dump foes hope for allies in new Congress

Benjamin Grove and Mary Manning

Monday, Nov. 13, 2000 | 11:25 a.m.

Nevada lawmakers may have picked up a few allies on Election Night in their battle against nuclear waste.

A handful of newly elected senators such as Hillary Clinton in New York could prove valuable, Nevada Democrats have said. But even in the new Congress, the deck is still stacked against the state, Nevada's bipartisan delegation agreed.

"I'm going to do everything I can with the hand I've been dealt," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. "It's going to be very, very difficult with a president (George W. Bush) who has (sided) with the nuclear industry. The majority of the Senate and House want to ship nuclear waste to Nevada."

Among the victorious Senate candidates who said they would have opposed a bill this year that directed nuclear waste shipments to Nevada are: Clinton; Debbie Stabenow in Michigan; Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Bill Nelson in Florida. Nevada Democrats also have hailed newly elected Tom Carper in Delaware, Mark Dayton in Minnesota and Jean Carnahan in Missouri.

Still, few members in the Senate and House outright oppose the federal plan to bury nuclear material in Nevada.

"It is independent of partisanship -- the other 49 states are desperate to keep this waste out of their back yards, and they are going to gang up on Nevada," Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said.

Gibbons said he already is working with Sen.-elect John Ensign to develop an "offensive" strategy to battle the waste plan on the Republican side of the aisle. Ensign was unavailable for comment.

Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain as the lone storage site for the nation's nuclear waste, which is now piling up at power plants across America. The Department of Energy is finishing up studies of the mountain to determine if it is a safe place to bury 77,000 tons of waste for at least 10,000 years.

The decision on whether to recommend the site likely will be made in July, DOE officials have said. Once the DOE's site recommendation is released, the department plans to conduct public hearings on its findings and incorporate them in the final report, DOE spokeswoman Gayle Fisher said.

After that, it will be up to the next president and his new energy secretary to send a recommendation to Congress, Fisher said. If Congress approves Yucca Mountain, it could take up to four years for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license a repository there.

In the meantime Congress could tackle a number of issues -- again -- next year and decide:

Nevada lawmakers also could face a bill that wraps all those issues -- and more -- into a single piece of legislation.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, a leading House advocate of the Yucca plan, envisions pushing a piece of legislation next year that "would cover all the bases on nuclear waste," Barton spokeswoman Samantha Jordan said. Barton likely would not pursue that until summer, Jordan said.

Reid said he suspects Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, and other leading Yucca advocates in the Senate will introduce nuclear waste-related legislation early in the session. A Murkowski spokeswoman was unavailable for comment this week.

"I don't think they'll wait that long," Reid said.

On the safety standards issue, Nevada lawmakers this year were able to win enough allies to advocate for stricter EPA -- not NRC -- standards. That would be harder next year without President Clinton backing the EPA, Reid and Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., said.

"My greatest fear is that if George Bush is elected, we are in real trouble trying to protect Nevada from nuclear waste," Bryan said on Election Night. Ensign took the retiring Bryan's seat.

Congress had discarded the temporary storage plan last year to pursue finishing the permanent site at Yucca Mountain as soon as possible. But Republican supporters of the Yucca plan could again seek to establish the temporary site as a place to store waste until Yucca is complete.

"Depending on the composition of Congress, temporary storage may be seen as another opportunity for the nuclear industry to get their wish list," said Wenonah Hauter, who follows the Yucca issue for consumer and environmental group Public Citizen.

The nuclear industry, which had been pushing the GOP-led Congress to approve temporary storage, is taking a cautious approach to lobbying for that issue in the next year.

"It's an open question," Nuclear Energy Institute spokesman Steve Kerekes said. "It will take us awhile to get a sense of the makeup of Congress and who is sitting in the White House. There are no real answers at this point."

The DOE opposes a temporary nuclear waste storage site in Nevada. The DOE has not even considered the fiscal impacts of trying to build a temporary site as it seeks to complete studies for the permanent site, Fisher said.