Reid panel cuts Yucca budget

Benjamin Grove

Wednesday, July 16, 2003 | 10:48 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., today unveiled a dramatically slashed budget proposal for Yucca Mountain next year -- $425 million.

The figure is well below President Bush's budget request of $591 million for the nuclear waste project and far less than the $765 million budget approved by the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday.

Reid is the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that crafts the annual Yucca budget. The budget process follows a familiar pattern each year in which Reid negotiates to cut the budgets proposed by House leaders and the president. The final Yucca budget is typically a compromise between what Reid proposed and what the president proposed.

Reid negotiated the $425 million budget as part of a national energy and water projects bill discussed today in the subcommittee. The panel approved the bill; the full Appropriations Committee could vote on it as early as Thursday.

Reid noted that $425 million was $100 million more than what the subcommittee approved last year.

"We're talking, even by Washington figures, a lot of money," Reid said.

In a previous statement Reid called the $765 million figure "outrageous, and it's insulting to Nevadans and all Americans."

Both Reid and panel chairman Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said there would be a heated battle between Senate and House negotiators over a final Yucca compromise.

"It'll come up, of course," Domenici said after the hearing, referring to the $425 million figure.

The House Appropriations Committee had approved what would be the biggest annual Yucca budget ever.

The House budget included:

But the Senate version of the bill included none of those provisions. Domenici said he generally supported the concept of temporary storage, but said he had not carefully considered the House language.

In a preview of the negotiating to come, a leading pro-Yucca senator, Larry Craig, R-Idaho, noted that Yucca is a decade behind in its development.

"I'm hopeful we can keep it on schedule, if not accelerate it some," Craig said.

The Yucca legislation and budget will be "a major point of contention" between the House and Senate as negotiators try to strike a compromise on the broader bill, Domenici said.

In other action, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she could not support the bill because it contains $24.8 million to speed readiness of the Nevada Test Site to do nuclear testing from 36 months to between 18 and 24 months; $15 million for research on a nuclear bunker buster bomb; $4 million in other advanced nuclear weapons research.