Senate Rejects GOP Bid for Nuclear Waste Site

The Senate on Tuesday failed to override President Clinton’s veto of a bill that would have required the Energy Department to proceed with construction of a single national site in Nevada where nuclear waste would be stored permanently.

The close vote ended the latest effort by Republican lawmakers to force the administration to use the Yucca Mountain site. The count was 64 to 35 to override, just two votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed.

But the issue probably will become more heated over the next months. Although such veto votes traditionally settle legislative disputes for the entire congressional session, Republican leaders indicated that they may bring the measure up again later this year.

In the meantime, analysts said that the impasse probably means that the nation’s nuclear power utilities will increase dumping of their waste at local storage sites, while passing on costs to consumers.

Congress has designated Yucca Mountain as a national nuclear waste-disposal facility. But the Energy Department has been postponing construction of the project until it can decide whether the area is environmentally suitable.

The site is 237 miles northeast of Los Angeles and 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The measure Clinton vetoed called for nuclear waste now stored temporarily at 72 sites in 31 states to be sent to the Nevada facility, beginning in 2007.

The legislation would have limited the role that the Environmental Protection Agency could play in helping to set standards for how much radiation the waste facility could emit.

Clinton objected to that and to the fact that the legislation did not provide authority for the Energy Department to take title to state waste-disposal areas--a move that the administration argues would provide a “responsible” way of dealing with the problem in the short term.

Republicans initially had included such a provision in the bill but dropped it to win more Democratic votes. The nation’s governors had lobbied against the provision for fear that it would eliminate their leverage in moving the waste out of their states.

Leading the bid to sustain the veto were Nevada’s two senators, Harry Reid and Richard H. Bryan, both Democrats. California’s two senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, also Democrats, voted with them.

Overall, 32 Democrats and three Republicans voted with the administration, while 51 Republicans and 13 Democrats voted to override the veto.

The fight over where--and how--to build a national nuclear waste-disposal site has been raging for 12 years, pitting the industry against environmentalists over what kinds of standards should be followed to limit radiation exposure in the area.

The Energy Department has said that it plans to decide next year whether to go ahead with the project, with hopes of completing a national nuclear-waste repository by 2010.

Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), a key sponsor of the legislation, warned that the veto would hurt the nuclear power industry. “We cannot allow it to strangle on its own waste without a viable alternative,” he told the Senate.

But Reid argued that the utilities can safely store their waste on local sites “for 100 years--scientists agree on that.” Bryan later told reporters that “there’s no crisis here,” as the industry contends.

Summarizing his view of the outcome of Tuesday’s Senate vote, he said, “The American public, 1, special interests, 0.”

With the override effort unsuccessful in the Senate, the House will not need to vote on the override. The House had passed the waste storage bill, 253 to 167.