More Yucca funds allotted

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, April 10, 2001 | 11:25 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The $1.96 trillion budget proposal President Bush sent to Congress Monday includes a 14 percent increase in federal spending on Yucca Mountain.

The appropriation apparently marks an effort to spur the nuclear waste project toward completion.

The budget also included $2.5 million for Nevada oversight of the Yucca project. However, no money was earmarked for controversial transmutation research, a possible alternative to long-term nuclear waste storage in Nevada.

Bush asked Congress for nearly $445 million for projects at Yucca during the 2002 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, up from about $390 million appropriated during the current fiscal year.

"The budget provides sufficient funds to allow the (Energy) Department to keep on schedule and continue its science-based approach to obtaining a national depository site," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said at a news conference outlining the department's $19.2 billion share of the Bush budget.

The money has been requested at a critical time during Yucca's development. Congress in 1987 chose Yucca to be the only site studied to become the nation's nuclear waste repository -- a permanent burial ground for 77,000 tons of high-level waste now stored at nuclear power plants and defense sites nationwide. The Department of Energy has been studying Yucca for years and is expected later this year to recommend the site to Congress, despite the objections of many Nevadans.

The $445 million would be used to gather data and assemble Abraham's formal recommendation to Bush about Yucca's future and to begin drafting a license application for submission to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC must approve a DOE license to store waste at the site, which could take up to four years.

The money also would be used for additional scientific tests inside Yucca. Scientists are still developing a design for the repository and will use the additional funds next year to shift from a conceptual to preliminary design stage.

Nevada lawmakers argue that Yucca is not a safe site and object to the DOE launching new phases of the project before Congress, the president, the NRC and the state of Nevada have a formal say in the approval process.

"If we are having cutbacks in the budget, I have no concept of how you justify spending more at Yucca Mountain, while at the same time cutting back on other important programs in Nevada, like nuclear cleanup," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. He said Bush had trimmed about $4 million out of cleanup funds at the Nevada Test Site.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said he opposed any Yucca funding.

"We'll do what we can as a delegation to scale back that amount," Gibbons said. "If we could scale it back to zero, that would be one cut I could live with."

There is one particular sentence in the DOE budget that made it clear the Bush administration "has been misleading the state of Nevada" into believing that its concerns mattered, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said.

It reads, "The FY 2002 budget is based on the presumption that the Secretary will decide, based on information obtained from site characterization and after considering the views and comments of the public, the State of Nevada and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; to recommend the site to the President in FY 2002."

Republican leaders, including Vice President Cheney and Abraham, in the past month have said publicly that nuclear power should be a bigger part of the "energy mix" in America, which relies heavily on coal and natural gas.

Nuclear power accounts for nearly 20 percent of electricity generated in the United States. Cheney is leading a task force that is assembling an energy strategy due in the next month or so. On a Sunday morning talk show Cheney said the nation should be building more power plants every year and "some of those ought to be nuclear."

Nevada lawmakers have opposed the growth of nuclear power until a waste solution is discovered. They oppose tax breaks and research money for nuclear power utilities that are tucked into the Bush budget.

Bush's budget included no money for transmutation research, part of what the DOE calls its advanced accelerator applications program.

Transmutation is an expensive, experimental technology that promises to decrease the toxicity of nuclear waste by bombarding it with subatomic particles until it is less dangerous, a process that, once developed, could replace the need to store waste. The Bush administration plans to review the research before funding it again, the DOE budget says.

That's disappointing to Nevada lawmakers, among them Gibbons, who called transmutation the "science of tomorrow."

"It deserves to be funded even more than that hole in the ground they call Yucca Mountain," Gibbons said.

Sen. John Ensign,R-Nev., has been lobbying fellow senators, such as John McCain, R-Ariz, and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., to include money for transmutation in the final budget.

"Joe Lieberman looked at me and said, 'No wonder you got elected to the Senate,'th" Ensign said. "Nobody (in Washington) understands the issue. It's an educational process with them."

The Bush budget also called for a decrease in renewable energy programs, such as research for solar and wind power initiatives. Abraham said that even with a pending energy crisis the Bush administration could not justify costly Clinton-era renewable energy programs that yielded few results.

"We decided it made little sense to continue forward with programs that have not helped us avert the energy crisis," Abraham said at his budget briefing.

Reid said tax credits that would help establish a planned privately funded wind farm in Nevada were not in danger. Reid said it was "senseless" to cut back on renewable programs now, but said the Senate likely would put money back into the budget for those programs.

"I would almost guarantee that those numbers will change," Reid said. "That's not something Bush will be able to get away with."

Congress, out of session for a two-week break, will likely resume budget battles when members return later this month.

Lawmakers sometimes dramatically change presidential budget requests, and Democrats were quick to criticize pieces of Bush's budget Monday.

Last year the DOE requested $437.5 million for Yucca studies; the House approved $413 million; the Senate approved $351 million; and the final agreement was roughly $390 million.

Bush's overall budget analysis reported that his proposals would: increase federal education spending in Nevada by more than $169 million; give 730,000 Nevada residents tax relief (a family of four making $75,000 in the state would receive a 25 percent tax cut, according to Bush figures); provide $206 million in federal highway money for Nevada.