House rejects Yucca bill: Legislation would have given DOE more authority

Benjamin Grove and Mary Manning

Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2001 | 11 a.m.

The House today scrapped -- for now -- legislation that would have taken Yucca Mountain project spending authority away from Congress.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., and Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., for two or three weeks in private conversations and phone calls have been bending the ears of key lawmakers, arguing that it is a bad idea to eliminate congressional oversight of the Yucca budget.

"No matter how each member of the House may feel about the Yucca Mountain project, not one of us should agree to cede our oversight of this incredibly dangerous project," Berkley said in a letter this week to House members. At issue is funding for the Yucca Mountain project, a plan to bury the nation's nuclear waste in an underground tomb at the desert site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Congress each year sets funding for the Energy Department to spend on the project. It allocates money -- about $7 billion in the past two decades -- to the DOE from a national nuclear waste fund, mostly fed by special taxes paid by ratepayers nationwide whose electricity is generated by nuclear reactors.

This year a group of congressional proponents of the Yucca plan, led by Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Billy Tauzin, R-La., sponsored a measure that would take Yucca budget-setting power away from Congress.

Under the proposal, the DOE would have direct access to about $10 billion now in the waste fund to use however and whenever it sees fit, without congressional limits. They inserted the legislation into a sweeping energy bill being debated in the House this week, saying the measure would help speed the Yucca project toward completion by giving DOE more spending freedom.

But Republican House leaders stripped the measure out of the energy package today, in part at Gibbons' request, in part to help win more votes for the underlying energy bill. Still, Barton and Tauzin on the House floor today promptly vowed to later this year revive their effort to take Yucca "off-budget."

Nevada lawmakers were still pleased. They use the Yucca budget process to whittle away the project's money flow each year, effectively delaying the project.

Gibbons on the House floor today argued that taking Yucca off-budget was irrational and fiscally irresponsible.

In the Senate, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., Senate Majority Whip, from his powerful perch on the Appropriations Committee, is pushing for a dramatically lower Yucca budget -- $275 million. The DOE requested $445 million for Yucca studies this year. Last year the agency got about $391 million.