Dean Heller at odds with GOP leadership over Yucca Mountain

By Karoun Demirjian

Monday, Feb. 14, 2011 | 2:41 p.m.

The White House has shown that the president is committed to keeping Yucca Mountain funding out of the president's proposed budget.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be push back from House Republicans, who said pretty explicitly last week they would forbid the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from bringing about an early end to their ongoing adjudicatory review, and oppose any attempts to use federal dollars to pay for “termination costs” of scaling back the project or its personnel.

But the GOP’s stance has angered Nevada’s senior Republican in the House enough that he’s pushing back against his party’s leadership with a clear message for how they should handle Yucca: drop it.

“Yucca Mountain, as a storage location for the nation’s nuclear waste, is dead. The release of the president’s budget today affirmed this,” said Nevada Rep. Dean Heller in a letter sent to House GOP leadership today. “Not only am I committed to the closure of Yucca Mountain, but the Senate majority leader and even the administration understand that transporting the nation’s nuclear waste to a state with no nuclear activity jeopardizes the security of our nation and is a bad investment of precious taxpayer dollars.”

Heller has taken a strong stance on the Yucca mountain issue in the past, a position that puts him at odds with the leaders of his party.

He seemed to embrace that divergence Monday in his letter, which was addressed to all three members of the GOP’s top leadership team: House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Whip Kevin McCarthy; and was also sent to the chairs of the Budget, Appropriations, Energy and Commerce, and Natural Resources committees. In it, he chided them not just for pursuing a project he’d rather see disbanded, but for reneging on their own principles of fiscal responsibility in pursuing Yucca’s continuation.

“Most recent estimates place the cost of the Yucca Mountain facility at nearly $100 billion,” Heller wrote. “Given our current economic climate and our serious debt problems, our nation cannot afford to continue with this poorly managed project.”

Nevada’s delegation members have strongly and vocally opposed the Yucca Mountain project going back to when the site was first proposed in 1982, regardless of whether they are Republican or Democrat. Current freshman Republican Rep. Joe Heck is the first exception to that rule -- he maintains that Yucca could be used as some sort of reprocessing facility in the future.

Heller has worked closely with those in leadership posts, and counts them among congressional colleagues who also rank as friends. But it’s not the first time he’s thumbed his nose at those more senior Republicans in the current Congress.

Just last week, Heller joined a small band of Republicans to keep the House from passing an extension of the Patriot Act provisions that let the federal government tap phone lines, pore through business transactions and conduct surveillance on suspicious individuals not known or suspected to have a connection to recognized terrorist entities. The measure failed by seven votes -- a procedural embarrassment for the heads of the House GOP.