Defense spending bill includes Yucca funds

Benjamin Grove

Friday, June 28, 2002 | 9:51 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate on Thursday approved a bill that maps out a defense spending policy for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 that includes money for Yucca Mountain.

On a 97-2 vote, the Senate approved a $393 billion blueprint for military spending programs for the Pentagon and other agencies that deal with defense issues, including the Energy Department, which manages the Yucca nuclear waste dump project.

Lawmakers must approve the legislation, called an authorization bill, before they act on a defense appropriations bill in which they vote to actually spend money on specific defense-related projects. The authorization bill contained $215 million for continued work on the Yucca project, a federal plan to permanently bury the nation's high-level nuclear waste underground at the Nevada site.

President Bush approved the project earlier this year and the House followed suit. The Senate is likely to vote next month.

The bill had contained $315 million for Yucca, but Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the No. 2 Senate Democrat, in his ongoing effort to slow and eventually kill the project, negotiated to slash that by $100 million.

However, the Yucca budget will be the focus of further negotiation with House lawmakers, and much of the money likely will be restored.

Congress budgets money for Yucca each year from two funds -- one set up by Congress that collects money from ratepayers who use nuclear-generated electricity. The other is the Defense Department budget, because nuclear waste from defense sources, such as naval submarines, would be buried at Yucca.

The Senate bill also included a provision that would allow all disabled veterans to collect both full retirement pay and full disability pay. Reid has pushed for the legislation unsuccessfully for several years.

Currently retirees with service-related disabilities have their retirement pay reduced to offset disability pay. The House bill would allow veterans to collect the full amount of both forms of income for veterans who are at least 60 percent disabled. The Senate bill covers all disabled veterans, so Senate and House negotiators will have to reach a compromise on the issue.

In other action Thursday, the House passed a military construction spending bill, along with its version of the defense appropriations bill, which included a 4.1 percent military pay increase for the armed services. Included in the bills was money for Nevada, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said:

All the bills are subject to further negotiations between House and Senate conference committees, which meet to hammer out differences between the two chambers.