Post-Yucca Mountain bill still a work in progress

WASHINGTON - A new plan to manage thousands of tons of the nation's nuclear waste was unveiled this week by a senator who conceded it is very much a work in progress.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, acknowledged Congress will not take up his bill this year. But Bingaman, who is retiring at the end of the year, said months of negotiations involving a handful of key senators raised issues that might best be opened for wider discussion starting at a hearing he plans to hold in September.

"My hope is to obtain testimony on it and build a legislative record that might serve as the foundation for further consideration and ultimate enactment in the next Congress," he said.

The 56-page bill would put in place some of the recommendations of the expert commission President Barack Obama formed in January 2010 after he decided to terminate the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada as a potential nuclear waste repository.

Chief among them, the bill would establish a more cooperative approach for the government to recruit states and communities to host temporary nuclear waste storage sites and a permanent repository.

Such a "consent based" approach would contrast from the experience of finding, studying and officially designating the Yucca site, which was done over Nevada's objections.

The Bingaman bill also removes nuclear waste management from the Department of Energy and places it in a new federal agency whose workings would be overseen by a three-member board. But how much independence the new body would have remains open for discussion, Bingaman said.

Bingaman and three other senators - Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska - failed to reach agreement on whether to allow temporary storage sites to be established before a permanent burial location is found. Some fear that nuclear waste could remain forever in "interim" storage if a full repository cannot be built.

Nevada officials were studying the bill Thursday to determine whether the Bingaman legislation would repeal the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and 1987 follow-up amendments that made Yucca Mountain the law of the land.

"It appears to put the nuclear waste policy (laws) behind us, but we need to give that further consideration before we can say for sure," said Bob Halstead, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

Brian O'Connell, nuclear waste adviser to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, said the legislation appears to be "neutral" on Yucca Mountain.

"I don't think it says one way or another," O'Connell said.

A Senate aide involved with the bill said it does not explicitly repeal the nuclear waste law "but it dramatically modifies it."

"It would amend many of the (Nuclear Waste Policy Act) authorities and insert much stronger local consultation provisions and a requirement that local government and the governor consent to a site before proceeding, among other things," said the aide, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760. Follow him on Twitter @STetreaultDC.