Thursday, June 29, 2006 | 7:42 a.m.
WASHINGTON - Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid emerged from a hearing room at the Capitol with the quiet satisfaction of a chess player who had executed a stunning maneuver. Then his speech quickened as he explained to reporters that he had worked - secretly for a year, it turns out - with the Senate's leading nuclear energy advocate on a new plan to store nuclear waste.
The toxic material would no longer be stored only at nuclear power plants across the nation. Nor would it be coming to Yucca Mountain, at least not anytime soon.
Instead, under a plan that Reid crafted with Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., any state with commercial nuclear power plants would be a candidate for a nuclear waste storage site somewhere within its borders.
Reid has spent much of his Senate career fighting the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain. Nuclear waste is unsafe to ship, he argues, and Yucca would not be a secure, fail-safe location for storage. Now he stood under the glaring hallway lights, surrounded by reporters, and spoke about the chess game:
"I'm being parochial about this. I think it's a tremendous step in the right direction. There'll be no interim storage in Nevada. It will focus attention on why you should just leave it where it is."
To be sure, the Reid-Domenici proposal is meant as a temporary step only - a 25-year solution. Domenici advocated the plan as a way to satisfy the nuclear industry's long-standing desire to move the waste to government-run storage, as Congress promised 20 years ago. Domenici says the waste would sit in those temporary locations until the permanent nuclear dump is ready - if it is ever ready - at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
For Domenici, addressing the storage problem clears the way for the industry to start building nuclear plants. The last one was licensed three decades ago.
Reid sees the chess board differently. The plan to build a string of temporary Yuccas across the country is certain to draw strong protests from the states involved, nudging them to agree with him that the waste should be kept at the plants.
"You can have all the requirements you want to move the waste, but as we've learned with Yucca Mountain, people aren't simply willing to have it moved," Reid said.
Also, said those who watched Reid in action this week, the veteran senator knows that Yucca's future is likely to be overshadowed by debate over the temporary sites.
"No state is going to let this happen," said Bob Loux, executive director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, the state agency fighting Yucca Mountain. "If they want to go around and spend money and time, more power to them. Attention paid to other things and not Yucca Mountain, we think is helpful. Delay is helpful."
Charles Pray, who represents Maine on nuclear issues and heads up a nuclear transportation advocacy group's Yucca Mountain task force, said he could not think of a single governor who would want to house the waste. The Reid-Domenici plan, he said, "is a diversionary scheme."
Reid and Domenici quietly crafted the plan as part of their broader energy package for 2007 - two senior senators who have spent years talking about nuclear policy from opposite sides of the table coming together as the promise of Yucca Mountain falters.
Domenici still argues that Yucca is the long-term solution. But he said this week that it could open no sooner than 2018 , years behind schedule. Even that, he conceded, "may or may not happen."
Reid says it will never open.
Domenici knows that Reid has his own agenda, but sees his colleague, whom he calls his closest friend in the Senate, as an ideal partner precisely because of the battles the two have had over Yucca Mountain.
"Other senators can and do have their own agendas, and absolutely they should," said Marnie Funk, a spokeswoman for a Senate appropriations subcommittee that Domenici heads. "He's committed to building support for this proposal even in unexpected places."
The Reid-Domenici proposal goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee today. It comes as the Bush administration's "fix Yucca" bill languishes on Capitol Hill. Now, rather than fixing Yucca, Congress is poised to debate temporary sites.
"This is clearly a case of frustration with Yucca," Loux said. "It's clear recognition that Yucca is a certainly failed policy, so obviously these folks see the need for interim storage."
Brilliant move or risky strategy, Reid's move provoked outrage from some Yucca opponents. They are angered that Reid would sign off on any plan that opens the door to massive ground shipments of waste for decades to come, even if the shipments are short-haul moves to nearby locations.
Nuclear energy foes argue that the Reid-Domenici plan would clear the way for the nuclear power renaissance the Bush administration advocates as a way to address the nation's energy problems. The federal government has banned construction of power plants until off-site locations are found for storing the waste.
Environmentalists and Yucca opponents see a massive stream of waste from new plants that ultimately would have no place to go other than Yucca.
"It's simply sweeping the waste under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist," Michele Boyd of Public Citizen said.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist and senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, worries that new plants, coupled with Domenici's other controversial goal of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, means the waste stream to Yucca would be unstoppable.
"It's a very dangerous game Reid is playing," he said. "It's going to come back and hurt Nevada."
Even Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., a Reid ally, cannot back the senator's plan. "Certainly in no way could Congresswoman Berkley sign off on any of it," her spokesman said. "The waste should not move."
But Reid is not worried. He knows it will be years before any waste would be moved . And during that time, a repository at Yucca Mountain will be fought every step of the way.
"This is a wonderful deal for the people of Nevada," he said. "I feel very comfortable with what we're doing."
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