DOE proposes $494.7 million for Yucca Mountain

By STEVE TETREAULT and TONY BATT
Las Vegas Review-Journal
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
February 05, 2008

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy proposed a $494.7 million budget for Yucca Mountain on Monday, and braced for another year of defending the project against critics in Congress.

The budget is almost the same amount that DOE requested last year to continue work on the nuclear waste repository it wants to build in Nevada. It was less than half of the $1.2 billion that Yucca project managers once told lawmakers would be necessary to keep the project on a preferred schedule.

After a series of years in which Congress has slashed Yucca spending, officials on Monday characterized their fiscal 2009 request as a realistic one.

"We intend to move ahead," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at a briefing on the final DOE budget of the Bush administration. The budget "demonstrates, we believe, our commitment to this project."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was resharpening his ax for the repository, several months after engineering a deep cut that prompted several hundred job layoffs and schedule delays that are still being calculated.

"Despite the fact Congress cut his proposal by $108 million last year, President Bush requested $495 million again this year," Reid said. "Clearly, he will not get that funding."

"On Yucca Mountain, the president's budget request will not be met," added Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.

DOE has all but officially written off a planned June deadline to apply for a repository construction license. Bodman said Monday the license application now would be completed sometime in 2008.

Previously DOE's "best-case" outlook had Yucca Mountain open and accepting nuclear waste by 2017. A new schedule could push that back by five years or more, and some experts say the opening date could be even further in the future, if ever.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said support in Congress will erode the longer the repository is delayed.

"The chance that Yucca Mountain will open before 2020 fades like a Nevada sunset," Berkley said. "President Bush is dreaming if he thinks Congress is going to waste another $495 million dollars on his plan to turn Nevada into a nuclear waste dump."

In addition, the 2009 budget for the Nevada Test Site would be cut by almost $27 million.

The Department of Energy is seeking $332.8 million for the test site, a 7.49 percent decrease from what Congress approved for this year.

At the same time, the 2009 budget for the department's site office in North Las Vegas would increase about 10.65 percent from this year.

The Nevada Site Office, which oversees a range of programs at the desert installation, would receive $190.5 million in 2009.

Thomas D'Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration which oversees the test site, said he does not know if the budget request would affect jobs.

"We expect a lot more happening at Nevada at the Device Assembly Facility," D'Agostino said.

The Device Assembly Facility, or DAF, is a 100,000-square-foot bunker 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas on the test site.

The facility was originally designed in the mid-1980s to assemble nuclear test devices before they were moved underground for detonation.

DAF is currently used to assemble subcritical or non-nuclear experiments that comply with the U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing, which began in 1992.

For security reasons, nuclear criticality machines as well as plutonium and highly enriched uranium have been transferred from Los Alamos National Laboratory to DAF, which is considered one of the most secure facilities in the world.

As for environmental cleanup of the test site, the Energy Department wants to slash last year's funding by 18.3 percent, to $65.7 million from $80.4 million.

The savings would be used to continue disposing of transuranic waste fat the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, about 20 miles east of Carlsbad, N.M. Transuranic waste is radioactive material that results from the research and production of nuclear weapons.