Final Word Missing on Nevada Nuclear Waste Tombstone : Energy: Plans for a Yucca Mountain repository have floundered for years. The House budget blueprint would put project in cold storage. Senate outlook is equally grim.

WASHINGTON — Already decades overdue and more than $4.2 billion spent, a proposed national burial ground for highly radioactive nuclear waste in Nevada is in danger of itself being buried--by federal budget cutters.

For years the government has tried to find a permanent resting place for an expected 86,000 metric tons of deadly spent fuel from the nation’s civilian nuclear power reactors.

Hundreds of tons of additional wastes, including large quantities of plutonium from the defense nuclear weapons program, also await a burial site.

But the Energy Department program, which has focused on a site at Yucca Mountain northwest of Las Vegas, has floundered for years and critics say the government is no closer to building the repository today than it was in the mid-1960s, when the search for a location began.

The House, in crafting its seven-year blueprint for balancing the federal budget, dramatically cut spending for the Yucca Mountain project, providing only enough to put it into cold storage. The Senate provides some additional money, but the program’s future remains tenuous.

Even some of the Yucca Mountain project’s supporters, who still have a 2010 target for getting it built, give it only a 50-50 chance.

“A repository will never be built at Yucca Mountain,” declared Sen. Richard H. Bryan (D-Nev.), who has called the plan ill-conceived, mismanaged, and troubled by technical and scientific uncertainties.

Congress increasingly is shifting its attention to finding a temporary above-ground waste storage facility.

Two key House chairmen--Reps. John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) of the Budget Committee and Robert S. Walker (R-Pa.) of the Science Committee--suggested it might be wiser and cheaper to concentrate on the interim above-ground site where spent fuel could be held for 100 years. Bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate to put a temporary storage site in Nevada.

The political turmoil has sent tremors through the Energy Department’s Yucca Mountain project office in Nevada where a huge boring machine is digging a massive tunnel into the desert rock--at the cost, by some estimates, of $60,000 a foot.

The tunnel, now more than 650 feet deep and 25 feet across, is designed as an underground laboratory to help determine if the rocky region can hold the nuclear material for tens of thousands of years. If congressional budget cutters prevail, the work will stop, say Energy Department officials.

“It cuts the program to the bone. The Yucca Mountain project will be gone as we know it,” Daniel Dreyfus, director of the department’s civilian radioactive waste management program, said of the House-passed budget.

The confusion over the Yucca Mountain program’s future comes as utility executives across the country are running out of room for spent fuel and demanding the government accept the waste, as it agreed to do decades ago. The 30,000 metric tons of spent fuel at reactors today are expected to double by 2010 when Yucca Mountain--if it survives the latest assaults--is supposed to open, and likely to nearly triple by 2030.

“The waste is not going to disappear. We cannot wave a magic wand,” said Samuel Skinner, president of Commonwealth Edison in Illinois, which operates a dozen nuclear reactors.

Even before the latest budget battles, the Yucca Mountain project was rocked by other controversies.

Two scientists at the Los Alamos national laboratory went public with their concern earlier this year about the possibility of a plutonium explosion amid the volcanic rocks thousands of years from now, sending radioactivity into the air and into ground water.

Plutonium would remain highly radioactive for 50,000 years and dangerous for as long as 240,000 years, say nuclear experts. But canisters are designed to keep the wastes from leaking for only 1,000 years, relying on natural geological formations after that.

The findings by the Los Alamos scientists are under intense review, but not yet discounted. But even if the explosion theory is disproved, the fact that it has surfaced at all could be a blow at a time when the program is battling to keep its funding.

“The Energy Department has an obligation to disprove it,” said Robert Loux, director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office.

The government began its search for a place to bury long-lived nuclear wastes in the 1960s. The Atomic Energy Commission declared a group of abandoned Kansas salt mines as ideal, only to overlook--as was later pointed out by state geologists--that the site was riddled “like Swiss cheese” with holes that would allow radioactive material to wander freely.

A dozen years later, as many as six separate sites were suggested, unleashing a political firestorm that forced the number down to three and then, at the direction of Congress in 1987, to only Nevada.

By then, more than $2 billion already had been spent.

Nevada officials have accused the Energy Department of waging a campaign to get the Yucca Mountain site approved at the expense of objective scientific analysis. They have fought the project at every step.

Since 1987, $2.2 billion has been spent on nuclear waste disposal programs, including $1.7 billion at Yucca Mountain.

Congressional and independent investigators repeatedly have cited poor management, cozy relationships and conflicts of interest between government officials and contractors in a program often described as unfocused, in disarray.

In 1992, Joel T. Hall, a retired Air Force general and a program consultant, in a scathing letter to then-Energy Secretary James Watkins called the program “a disgrace . . . [that] is doomed to failure.”

He accused managers of tailoring their data collection to support a successful license application, instead of determining objectively whether the site is scientifically suitable. For example, he wrote, one contractor working to determine if the site was suitable already had a contract to get the site licensed and built.

The Clinton Administration revamped the program’s focus on site suitability, sped up drilling and vowed to determine whether a repository is suitable for Yucca Mountain by 1998, with construction to be completed by 2010.

In May, a consultant’s review conducted for state utility regulators concluded that the Energy Department still has “failed to inspire any significant level of public trust and confidence” in the program.

There have been other concerns such as the region’s susceptibility to earthquakes, what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff called “poorly understood” volcanic activity in the area, and the NRC’s concerns about “substantial gaps” in scientific data.

And critics note that even with a proposed capacity of 70,000 metric tons, the Yucca Mountain site still would not be able to accommodate all of the civilian spent fuel expected to have accumulated--not to mention the government’s weapons-related wastes.