Ensign, Reid grill Abraham on Yucca

Benjamin Grove

Thursday, May 16, 2002 | 11:11 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada's senators faced off against Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham this morning in a Senate hearing, peppering the Cabinet member with questions about the need to move forward on a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.

As a courtesy, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., allowed Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign to sit with the panel and confront Abraham after he testified.

Ensign, R-Nev., began by challenging Abraham's notion that shipping waste to Yucca Mountain will create a single national dump and rid waste from 131 storage sites nationwide. Nevada leaders assert that waste will always be spread across the country in temporary storage at reactor sites s long as power plants produce energy -- and waste.

"We're not going to have just one site," Ensign said. "And that's what you have led people to believe."

Abraham said it was important to at least decrease the amount of waste at the reactors. He stressed that the shipments would clean up closed power plant sites where waste is still stored.

Abraham countered Nevada's claims that the Yucca site and transportation of waste are unsafe. At one point he assured Ensign that it was not as if "garbage cans" would be used to haul the material across the country.

But Ensign said more study of shipping waste must be done, adding that it can be safely stored for 100 years at current locations.

"Why move forward when we haven't studied these things?" Ensign said.

Ensign also alleged the Energy Department has been biased throughout Yucca development because the federal government has never had a back-up plan.

"The DOE has said we're putting all our eggs in one basket," Ensign said. "That proves to me that the DOE is tunnel-visioned toward Yucca Mountain."

Abraham said that characterization was unfair:

"We've been fair and objective."

The two got into several testy exchange, with each interrupting the other.

Ensign also said the nation should spend more money on alternatives such as reprocessing and recycling, which could at least decrease the amount of time waste would be radioactive.

"The potential is there," he said. "That's our point. We don't need to hurry with this thing."

Reid, D-Nev., also fired off questions, at one point suggesting Abraham was applying his Harvard Law School education to evade the questions.

Abraham testified that waste transportation has been proven to be safe, in part because there are 300 million hazardous waste shipments nationwide each year.

Reid, the majority whip, said that point wasn't valid because high-level nuclear waste is far more deadly and not comparable to average waste shipments.

"This is some of your Harvard logic, but we have to sort right through that," Reid said.

In his testimony, Abraham restated his well-known case for Yucca, saying that scientists had considered the potential effects that earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, water flows through the mountain, or even a glacial age would have on the waste.

Even under those conditions, waste would remain safely isolated, he said.

Abraham said he had reached those conclusions after studying the evidence, talking to scientists and visiting Yucca.

"I did so with great concern for the people in the area, people in Nevada," Abraham said.

He also argued that Yucca was needed to secure the future of nuclear power in America. Waste from U.S. submarines was piling up in a temporary site in Idaho, he added.

"The decision to move forward with this is a very important one, and the correct one," Abraham assured senators.

Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., made some of his most candid comments in opposition to a Yucca repository. He was worried about nuclear waste being shipped through Colorado on its way to Nevada, he said.

Campbell, so far Ensign's only Republican colleague to oppose Yucca, said there had been 126 large truck wrecks in the Rocky Mountains since 1993. "There's no question trucks are crashing all the time."

Campbell also likened Yucca Mountain to someone building a nice house and then trying to build a septic tank on the neighbor's property.

"I just think that's morally wrong," he said. "I'm not at all sure we ought to be dumping it in Nevada."

Campbell smiled as he suggested the waste should instead be shipped to Michigan, Abraham's home state. Abraham did not answer.

"There's no response to that," Bingaman said with a smile.

"I noticed," Campbell responded.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said she supports Yucca Mountain because her state has three sites with nuclear waste and she has concerns about terrorist attacks on those sites.

"This material is all over the nation," Landrieu said. "The faster we get about doing it, the better."

She asked Abraham about the 293 unresolved scientific issues in a General Accounting Office report last year.

Abraham said 41 already have been resolved, and the remaining 252 will be addressed by the time the Energy Department submits its license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December 2004.

"Some have tried to characterize these as defects, they're not," Abraham said. "These aren't show stoppers. These are technical steps that need to be taken before licensing."

Abraham recommended the project in January, which President Bush approved. Abraham has since urged lawmakers to stamp their approval on the project that proposes to bury 77,000 tons of the nation's radioactive waste at the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Last week the House gave Yucca its final approval with a 306-117 vote.

The Senate committee is expected to hold two more hearings on Yucca next week, in which Nevada officials, then scientific experts, will testify. The panel is likely to send Yucca to the full Senate on June 5. The full Senate is expected to vote on Yucca in July.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, a leading advocate of Yucca, stressed to fellow panel members that the upcoming vote was critical. If the Senate rejects Yucca, the nation will be left searching for a new waste plan, he said.

"This is a one-shot deal," Craig said. "Congress gets one bite at this apple."