Columnist Benjamin Grove: Reid, Chu hug, then slug it out over dump

Benjamin Grove

Friday, April 11, 2003 | 4:33 a.m.

ONLY IN the strange and wonderful world of Congress would Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and his Yucca Mountain foe, Margaret Chu, share a hug.

The unusual moment unfolded last week in that warmest and fuzziest of settings: a Senate budget hearing. It's that time of year again when lawmakers scour budget requests made by federal departments for the next fiscal year. Cabinet secretaries and federal project managers spent the last few weeks trudging up to Capitol Hill to justify -- and beg for -- their multibillion-dollar requests.

So it was that Chu came before the 13-member Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Yucca Mountain budget.

As it happens, the top Democrat on that panel is Reid, which means the Department of Energy's Yucca project chief was in the position of requesting money from the project's most powerful enemy.

Before the hearing started, Chu chatted quietly with panel chairman Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and the two shared a brief hug. Reid, standing nearby, joked with Chu, "Where's my hug?"

Chu obliged, and those gathered in the hearing room joined the two in a good laugh.

The irony was hard to miss. Everyone knows that when it comes to the Yucca Mountain budget, Reid does not embrace Chu's department. He batters it. Every year in quiet negotiations with fellow senators, the wheeling-and-dealing No. 2 Senate Democrat arranges to slash funding for the nuclear waste repository, forcing Yucca managers to scramble to trim expenses and delay work.

Moments after their hug, Reid was grilling Chu with some tough questions. Among them: How can you possibly keep the project on schedule, given past budget cuts?

But Chu promised she could, and she vowed to stick to an aggressive timetable to submit an application for a Yucca construction license by December 2004.

Project managers are considering various near-term cost-saving measures, Chu said in an interview later. She confirmed that one possibility is the delay of a $1 billion rail spur in Nevada.

The schedule is "extremely tight," and delaying the whole project any further would be costly, Chu said.

Chu and her fellow project managers face a lot of challenges: the license application, three or four years of Nuclear Regulatory Commission scrutiny and a fight in federal court with the state of Nevada later this year.

But the most immediate battle for Chu -- and the battle that likely will continue to intensify more and more each year -- is the fight over money. That conflict has taken on a new urgency now that the site has been officially designated by President Bush and approved by Congress.

After two decades of site research and annual budgets in the $300 million to $400 million range, Chu plans to start asking Congress for much bigger pots of money every year as construction and waste-transportation planning advance. Yucca budget requests could soar beyond $1 billion by 2005.

Chu warned that there was no way to keep the $58 billion project on its current timeline if Congress did not approve her $591 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. She is still reeling from a $134 million cut in 2003 spending. Chu needs the money to finish the license application and begin work on a waste-shipping plan, she told the panel.

Chu has friends on the money committees, notably Domenici and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho. But Reid has no intention of allowing Chu to reap full funding for next year or any year. "We'll do that at the right time," Reid said, in an interview, of his plan of attack for Chu's $591 million request.

Reid had scoffed at Chu's contention that there was hope to keep the project running on time.

The senator said people are going to wonder how Chu could possibly keep Yucca on a 2010 timetable and "get everything done correctly and properly," given decades of budget cuts.

"All of us will want to know what you did wrong or not at all," Reid told Chu at the budget hearing.

Later, a reporter asked Chu if Reid was a good hugger. She chuckled and said that he was.

But it is a mighty cold embrace, and Chu knows that better than anyone.