WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy scaled back its planned Yucca Mountain spending in a 2008 budget it announced Monday, delaying railroad designs and deferring advanced research while focusing on forming a license application for the nuclear waste site.

Department leaders sent Congress a budget requesting $494.5 million for the proposed waste repository in the year that begins Oct. 1.

It was the smallest Yucca Mountain request since fiscal 2002, and $50 million below what the Bush administration budgeted last year for 2007.

That request has not been finalized on Capitol Hill, although lawmakers appeared to be settling on $445 million.

"The goal is to try to create a license application in the next 18 months, that is really what the focus is," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said of Yucca at a budget briefing. "There are various other aspects we are not pursuing."

Bodman said the project is not being scaled back.

"It is a matter of looking in realistic ways as to where our opportunities are," he said. "It is not a matter of retrenching, it is a matter of try to recognize our priorities."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a repository critic, said, "I promise the highest congressional scrutiny for this waste of taxpayer dollars."

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., another critic, said the budget for the much-delayed repository was "reckless."

"To ask for an additional dime for this doomed project is not only fiscally irresponsible but an insult to the residents of Nevada," Porter said.

The DOE budget contains $2.5 million for the state of Nevada to fund its own Yucca oversight programs, and $1.5 million for Nye County, where the site is located.

Nye County, Clark County and other Nevada counties that border Nye, plus Inyo County in California, would split another $4 million.

Within the $494.5 million request, DOE officials said they plan to allocate $131 million on completing a voluminous license application by a self-declared June 30, 2008, deadline.

Another $195.2 million is budgeted to continue designing an above-ground complex where highly radioactive waste would be managed before being placed in the mountainside.

On the other hand, designs for a railroad line DOE wants to build to the Yucca site were cut back by $22 million, while spending was deferred on development of rail cars and early purchase of waste casks, a cut of $30.8 million.

Research into specialty metals and other advanced technologies that might be integrated into the repository effort also was deferred.

But the budget does contain $2 million for a study ordered by Congress on whether a second repository should be built, and where.

Project director Ward Sproat said Yucca Mountain was pressed by Bush administration demands to keep spending under control and to lower the federal deficit.

Spending for railroad designs became expendable for now, he said, because DOE has not yet decided on competing railroad corridors to the repository site.

A draft environmental impact study is expected this summer comparing an east-west corridor from Caliente to Yucca Mountain with a north-south corridor through Western Nevada.