Yucca financing taking shape

WASHINGTON — House and Senate committees this week took the first steps toward setting Yucca Mountain spending for 2008, a year in which the Department of Energy plans to meet a key licensing milestone if Congress supplies the funds.

The Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday chopped $50 million from the military’s contribution to the Yucca project, which would store Defense Department nuclear waste along with commercial used fuel within the planned repository 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

On Wednesday, the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee formed a spending bill that would fully fund the repository plan at the $494.5 million amount that DOE requested.

Both actions took place early in the Capitol Hill budget process. Final spending for nuclear waste disposal won’t be set until the fall.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., engineered the Senate cut. Though the Pentagon asked for $292 million as its share of the program next year, the Armed Services Committee reduced that to $242 million.

“The more success we have in cutting funds for this reckless project, the further from reality it becomes,” said Ensign, a committee member who opposes the disposal of high-level nuclear waste disposal in the state, as do most of its other elected leaders.

But in the House, Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., the chairman of the energy and water subcommittee, included full funding for Yucca in his panel’s annual DOE spending bill.

Visclosky told reporters he wanted to ensure that the Energy Department had the money it said it needed to complete a Yucca license application.

Ward Sproat, director of the Energy Department’s office for Yucca Mountain, has testified to Congress that the DOE hopes to complete a repository license bid and file it with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by next June.

The repository would not open until 2017, and probably a half-dozen years later, under schedules devised by DOE. The state of Nevada and environmental groups plan to mount legal challenges in a continuing effort to kill the project outright.