Yucca battle closer as House panel OKs budget

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, July 15, 2003 | 11:15 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The House Appropriations Committee today approved a bill that included a Yucca Mountain budget of $765 million, which would be the highest ever if it clears the full House and Senate.

The bill also includes a number of directives aimed at speeding completion of the nuclear waste project.

The full House could vote on the bill as early as next week, according to Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that drafted the bill. The full committee approved the legislation, which sets budgets for national energy and water projects, on a voice vote this morning.

If approved by the full House, the bill would likely face a showdown with Senate negotiators, including Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who often successfully negotiates to slash the Yucca budget.

The bill applies to the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 for Yucca Mountain, the site selected for the national nuclear waste repository.

Hobson today reiterated that of all the nation's energy and water projects, "My top priority is Yucca Mountain."

The bill also:

Congress has previously considered -- and President Bill Clinton vetoed -- the interim waste site proposal. But two things have changed, according to the bill: Congress last year approved Yucca as the best waste site after it was approved by President Bush.

And, according to the bill, "the events of Sept. 11, 2001, made clear that facilities we once assumed to be safe from terrorist attack may no longer be so."

Nevada lawmakers do not buy the argument that a temporary waste site would better secure the waste now piling up at 103 nuclear reactors nationwide.

Still, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said it would be difficult to counter the Sept. 11 argument.

"Here again, it's 49 states against Nevada," Gibbons said. "This is going to be a challenge for us."

But Reid on Monday said that any plan to ship waste to Nevada early had as much chance of passing the Senate as "I do of hitting a home run at the All-Star home run derby in Chicago."

The Energy Department isn't close to being ready to ship waste, Reid said. And the argument that waste could be more securely stored at a temporary site is "outrageously false" because some amount of waste will always be stored at the nuclear plants that produce it, Reid said.

An interim site would merely create one more terrorist target, anti-Yucca activists said.

"It's certainly not what Nevada wants -- to have an above-ground storage pad for the nation's stock of nuclear waste, which invites a security disaster," said Lisa Gue, an analyst for the watchdog group Public Citizen.

There is said to be strong bipartisan support in the House for the $765 million Yucca budget and the other Yucca provisions.

"The only people who don't like it are from Nevada," Hobson said today after the hearing, of the interim waste site proposal.

Reid said he was optimistic that he could negotiate to trim the $765 million budget in the House bill to less than the $591 million requested in President Bush's budget. Reid is also a top Democrat on the subcommittee that crafts the Senate's energy and water projects bill, including the Yucca budget. A hearing on that bill is scheduled for Wednesday.