Senate plan leaves Yucca project off the budget
WASHINGTON — The Senate took an initial step Thursday to end funding for the Yucca Mountain Project when its budget committee approved a 2011 blueprint that senators said contains no room for the nuclear waste repository plan.
The budget plan put together by Chairman Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., “supports the president’s request to close the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository and establish a blue ribbon commission to investigate alternatives,” according to a Senate Budget Committee document.
The budget resolution is an early but not surprising sign that senior senators under the direction of Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., do not want to continue spending for the Yucca Mountain Project. President Barack Obama has declared he wants to end the underground waste storage program, and a blue ribbon study panel began work last month on searching for other strategies.
Although the Obama administration plan is being challenged through several lawsuits, Reid said Thursday the Senate budget “makes very clear that taxpayer dollars will no longer be wasted on Yucca Mountain and without funding the project is dead.”
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who sits on the budget committee, said the panel “affirmed President Obama’s decision to shut down Yucca Mountain and I look forward to the full Senate voting to do the same.”
The budget resolution is a broad stroke overview of how Congress might prioritize its spending and taxing for the upcoming fiscal year that starts in October. It serves as a guideline for appropriations subcommittees to write follow-up spending bills over the summer.
Senators on the subcommittee that writes the Department of Energy spending bill could ignore the budget plan and set their own priorities. But if they added money for Yucca Mountain they would do so at the risk of crossing Reid, who has made the project’s shutdown a signature career issue.
The Senate Budget Committee, by a 12-10 vote, approved a blueprint that calls for tighter limits on spending than what Obama has proposed. Ensign voted against it, according to his office, because it still contained too much “wasteful and out-of-control government spending.”
Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or
202-783-1760.