Compromise details show Yucca accounts zeroed out

WASHINGTON -- Details released Tuesday on the federal budget compromise that was negotiated late last week confirmed a couple more of the nails that Sen Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he hammered into a Yucca Mountain coffin.

A copy of the legislation released by the House Appropriations Committee showed that funding accounts for civilian nuclear waste disposal and defense nuclear waste disposal were zeroed out.

The bill and accompanying documents lent some clarity to the funding picture surrounding the Nevada nuclear waste program that the Obama administration largely had terminated. Questions had persisted over programs in the nooks and crannies of the trillion-dollar budget and how they would be solved.

Reid for well more than two decades had worked toward turning off the spigot of dollars for the nuclear waste repository he long opposed. The release of details on the budget agreement enable him to say finally, as he did on Monday, that, "in the budget we negotiated, there is no money going to Yucca Mountain."

Besides the dollars, Reid also killed a provision that would have prevented the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from moving forward with closing down its portion of the Yucca project.