Senators offer Yucca alternative

Benjamin Grove

Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005 | 7:40 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. John Ensign are expected today to unveil long-anticipated legislation that formally proposes their alternative to Yucca Mountain -- leaving waste at the nuclear power plants that produced it.

With that, the Nevada senators will have fired an opening salvo in what is expected to be a war of wills next year with the Bush administration and key lawmakers over the nation's shifting nuclear waste policy.

The Energy Department is still forging ahead with the planned nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, but reworking the plan to simplify it.

One of the repository's strongest proponents, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., recently said Yucca was not "the final answer" but would play a role in the nation's nuclear waste plan.

The senators spent the year drumming up support for their bill, but it is not expected to have more than three sponsors. Reid, Ensign and Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, who dropped his support for Yucca in September, publicly advocated on-site storage this year.

It's possible Reid and Ensign will gather more support in the next year, Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said.

"The tide really is turning against Yucca Mountain," Hafen said. "There are a lot of alternatives being discussed, and this is one alternative."

Hafen declined to discuss the bill in detail until it was officially introduced. Ensign, returning from a night on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan docked off California, was unavailable Tuesday.

"The purpose of the bill is to provide a viable alternative to transporting nuclear waste," Ensign spokesman Jack Finn said, previewing one argument for the legislation that the senators are likely to make repeatedly.

The bill's introduction has an important broader context, as Congress and the Energy Department consider significant changes to the nation's nuclear waste policy.

The current 18-year-old strategy for dealing with the highly radioactive waste -- produced by 103 operating U.S. commercial nuclear reactors, as well as Defense Department waste from nuclear submarines and other sources -- has been to bury it all in underground tunnels at Yucca Mountain. But Yucca has long been delayed.

The bill by the two Nevada senators scraps that plan and directs the federal government to "take title" -- ownership -- of the waste and pay to store and secure it in the waste pools and above-ground containers at the plants where it is produced.

Reid and Ensign wanted to introduce the bill in the final days of this year's congressional session because they wanted to give themselves a full year to press for it in 2006.

They will have competition.

The Energy Department is crafting its own nuclear waste policy changes. The department is committed to building Yucca Mountain, but other proposed policy shifts have been kept under wraps.

There has been much speculation about what the department might propose. For instance, it's possible it will outline its plans on whether to pursue the controversial and costly technology used to recycle nuclear waste. The Energy Department this spring will have to account for how it plans to spend $50 million approved by Congress to research the recycling technology.

Another policy change may involve storing some waste at an interim site or sites -- possibly, even, Yucca Mountain. Creating such a temporary waste site is part of an "ongoing dialogue" at the department, spokesman Craig Stevens said. Making Yucca that site is "not off the table."

There are also rumors that the department could aim to take Yucca Mountain "off-budget," curbing the ability of Congress to set annual Yucca budgets and giving the department more direct access to an $18 billion national nuclear waste fund. That proposal has the support of a few key lawmakers, but it has been rejected by Congress in the past.

Any of those kinds of major changes would take an act of Congress -- and would be strongly opposed by Democratic leader Reid and the rest of the Nevada delegation. Likewise, the Reid-Ensign

legislation will meet with resistance in Congress and outright opposition by the nuclear power industry. The industry has not supported storing waste on-site indefinitely, even if the government takes responsibility for it, said Trish Conrad, spokeswoman for the Nuclear Energy Institute. Meanwhile investors and the nuclear industry, which has proposed an ambitious plan to begin constructing a new generation of nuclear power plants, will be watching the Energy Department and Congress closely next year to see how the government redefines its nuclear waste policy, analysts said. "The financial community is certainly worried about resolving this issue for existing plants, and so far, the Yucca Mountain plan has been the preferred option for the indus try,( said Caren Byrd, a nuclear analyst with Morgan Stanley. "It's something that as a nation we have to come to grips with. This is one of the things that has to be resolved before we can commit to new nuclear (plants).

Benjamin Grove can be reached at (202) 662-7436 or at grove@lasvegassun.com