Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Senator frustrated Yucca project not moving faster

Domenici says delay slowing expansion of nuclear plants

Pete Domenici Senator attends book-signing at Desert Research Institute

Sen. Pete Domenici, the powerful Republican from New Mexico who wants to get the ball rolling on burying nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, said Monday he's frustrated the project doesn't get more funding, because it leaves expansion of U.S. plants mired while other countries are becoming more reliant on nuclear power.

"The frustration is why has it taken so long? Why does it seem elsewhere to be so easy and here to be so tough?" he said before signing copies of his book, "A Brighter Tomorrow: Fulfilling the Promise of Nuclear Energy."

Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee who also chairs the subcommittee that writes funding bills for energy and water projects, attended the book-signing at the Atomic Testing Museum on the Desert Research Institute campus.

Earlier in the day, he met for several hours with officials at the Energy Department's Office of Repository Development after first meeting with a group on water desalination in Las Vegas.

The senator noted that although the United States relies on nuclear power for 20 percent of its electricity, France has an 80 percent reliance and China has ordered 20 new power reactors.

"So my frustration is, `Why not in America?' " he asked.

Currently, the $58 billion project to build a maze of tunnels inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and entomb highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies there is creeping along at a $577 million annual funding pace.

Despite the fact there's $12.6 billion in a ratepayers' fund to finance the effort, the Department of Energy has missed its target to submit a license application for review this year, and it's questionable if plans and methods to begin hauling the waste will be in place by 2010.

Among the apparent roadblocks is an appeals court ruling this summer that the Environmental Protection Agency's 10,000-year radiation protection standard needs to be extended to hundreds of thousands of years in the future.

Asked if he intends to pass legislation next year to keep the current standard intact, Domenici said, "We're looking very carefully at what that court decision means."

He said legislation to skirt the court's ruling might not be needed, but "we'll see."

In his book, Domenici urges the United States and other countries to rely more on nuclear power and to follow through on the government's commitment to dispose of spent fuel in a permanent site where it can be retrieved for reprocessing and reduction in the amount of waste as technology permits.

In essence, Yucca Mountain is an interim solution to a long-term problem that eventually will be resolved through reprocessing and transforming the waste, he said. "But we're late in the game because of past executive orders by presidents like Carter."