Senators advance sweeping energy bill

Friday, March 8, 2002 | 10:45 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

WASHINGTON -- The Senate approved tougher pipeline safety provisions today and reached agreement on measures that would sharply increase the use of ethanol in gasoline, while phasing out an additive blamed for water pollution.

The pipeline safety measure, approved by a 94-0 vote, was inserted into a sweeping energy bill being debated by the Senate. Similar pipeline measures cleared the Senate in each of the past two years, but never made it through the House.

Separately, senators announced agreement on a measure that would triple the amount of ethanol produced for gasoline to 5 billion gallons and ban MTBE, the gas additive blamed for fouling waterways in many states.

On Thursday, the Senate renewed for 10 years a government-backed insurance plan for nuclear power plants that makes taxpayers liable for accident clean-up costs beyond $9.5 billion.

The ethanol agreement would phase out MTBE over four years and require at least 5 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol be used by refiners by 2012. It also would end the federal mandate that gasoline contain a certain amount of oxygenate in areas with clean air problems.

The agreement had been worked out over several weeks in negotiations among farm interests, the oil industry, environmentalists and MTBE manufacturers. Most of the provisions are already in the bill, but the compromise assured they would not be stripped from the legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., called it "a fine balance of often disparate and competing interests" that will provide refiners with greater flexibility in federal gasoline regulations while continuing to protect air quality.

Senate approval of the pipeline measures were spurred by concern over several major pipeline accidents including a fiery one in 1999 in Bellingham, Wash., where three young people were killed, and a pipeline explosion in 2000 in New Mexico that killed 12 campers.

The amendment calls for better training of federal and state pipeline inspectors, and expansion of pipeline monitoring and reporting by industry.

In response to security concerns, raised by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Senate added provisions to bar the release of some sensitive pipeline data that in the past had been readily available.

Meanwhile, there were signs that Republican support for drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will erode if the controversy threatens Senate passage of the broader energy legislation, say some lawmakers.

While supporters of such drilling may be able to muster a narrow majority, they have been unable to get close to the 60 votes needed to overcome a certain filibuster by Democrats who have vowed to protect the refuge.

Thursday's action on the insurance plan, called the Price-Anderson Act, was approved as an amendment.

The House passed the act as a separate bill in November, so House and Senate negotiators likely will negotiate its final form.

According to the legislation, corporate owners of the nation's 105 nuclear reactors would pool roughly $9.5 billion to pay for a nuclear accident. Congress would be liable for expenses beyond that.

Lawmakers who support the act said a catastrophic accident with clean-up costs in the billions is highly unlikely. In the 45-year history of the Price-Anderson plan, no nuclear accident has required a government bailout. The Three Mile Island accident cost about $70 million.

But anti-nuclear groups and Nevada lawmakers oppose the Price-Anderson Act, calling it an unfair government subsidy of the nuclear industry.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., called it a "sweetheart deal" during debate Thursday.

The act is set to expire in August. If it expired, current nuclear plants would continue to be covered under the liability-pooling plan, but any new plants would not. Nuclear industry officials say renewing the act is key to the future of U.S. nuclear power. The act was first passed in 1957 because private insurance companies would not insure nuclear plants.