Cheney urged to heed waste options

Benjamin Grove

Wednesday, May 9, 2001 | 10:51 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said he and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., urged Vice President Dick Cheney during a Tuesday meeting to consider "myriad options" to burying the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada.

But the senators would not detail the content of the meeting in Cheney's Capitol office. Reid, Ensign and Cheney agreed not to rehash their 15-minute meeting with the media, Ensign said. They plan further talks.

"The vice president views those conversations with the senators as private and would not be one to divulge" details, a Cheney spokeswoman said.

Nevada's senators requested the meeting to again voice their opposition to a plan to bury high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, they said.

Ensign and Reid support alternatives, such as leaving the waste stored on-site at the 103 nuclear power reactors, at least until new technologies are developed for dealing with the waste.

They support an expensive, undeveloped technology called transmutation, which breaks waste down into a less harmful form. But the Energy Department did not include money for transmutation research in its budget proposal for next year.

Cheney will release a report next week outlining a national energy strategy that includes increasing nuclear power output. Nevada lawmakers say the country needs a safe solution to waste disposal before building new nuclear power plants.

Reid and Ensign's aides said after the meeting that the senators were encouraged that Cheney and President Bush had not pursued an interim nuclear waste storage site -- a temporary facility at the Nevada Test Site to store waste until Yucca is completed in 2010, at the earliest. The interim site has been proposed in past congressional sessions and bitterly opposed by Nevada lawmakers.

Reid and Ensign also said they were thankful that Cheney and Bush have stood behind a pledge Cheney made during the campaign that the Environmental Protection Agency -- not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- should set radiation safety standards, their press secretaries said.

While details about the meeting were scarce, Cheney talked at some length earlier Tuesday about nuclear waste in a CNN interview on energy issues. "Eventually, there ought to be a permanent repository," he said.

The vice president touted nuclear energy as a "safe" technology that was good for the environment.

"One of the great ways to deal with greenhouse gases is nuclear power plants," Cheney said.

He never specifically mentioned Yucca Mountain in his remarks, saying the waste issue was a "tough problem."

"But just making the decision that we think nuclear power deserves another look, that it may offer us significant potential for the future, that does, in fact, then entail us going back and addressing the waste question.

"And there have been steps taken. There have been (waste disposal) sites studied. There's a lot of work that's been done here. There's more that needs to be done if we're actually going to resolve it."

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., criticized Cheney's position on increasing nuclear power. On Tuesday Berkley said the Yucca project was a waste of money and unsafe. She reiterated the findings of a DOE inspector general's report that found some public confidence in the project has eroded.

"The further we investigate Yucca Mountain, the more money we spend, the more obvious it becomes that Yucca Mountain is not the answer," Berkley said in written comments to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which was meeting in Arlington, Va., Tuesday. Congress created the board in 1987 to review and evaluate the DOE's efforts to dispose of nuclear waste.