Tuesday, April 30, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole has not scheduled a vote this week on a bill to temporarily store highly radioactive waste at the Nevada Test Site.
"That doesn't mean it couldn't come up later, but not this week," Dole spokesman Jeremy Wallison said Monday.
The bill could be attached to a 1997 budget package later in the year, but nuclear industry leaders, government officials and lawmakers were not encouraged.
The Nuclear Energy Institute's Steve Kraft said after opening a nuclear waste conference in Las Vegas Monday that Dole had said he would not bring the bill up unless he had the votes to pass it.
President Clinton has threatened to veto the bill targeting Nevada for temporary nuclear waste storage if it passes in Congress. Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid, both D-Nev., said they will filibuster any such bill.
The 1987 amendment targeting Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the only study site for a national nuclear dump was passed in a year without a presidential election and with the help of Sen. Bennett Johnston, D-La.
Rep. John Ensign, R-Nev., said Monday he had spoken with Dole last week and had been assured SB 1271 would not reach the Senate floor. "Senator Dole said he had no intention of brining it to the floor," he said.
"It's too early to call a victory, but every delay helps," Ensign said. The congressman said he had talked to House members supporting a similar bill -- HR 1020 -- and they said it had little chance of passing.
Earlier Monday, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said temporary nuclear waste storage in Nevada has been held for at least a year.
"If it can't get through the Senate, there's no point in our bringing it up," Gingrich said during a campaign fund-raiser for Ensign at The Mirage.
"It's a very big problem for the utility industry to find some site and it is a very big problem moving the bill," Gingrich said. "I think it should move in the Senate first."
The chief of the U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear waste management program was discouraged, but not willing to give up drilling into Yucca Mountain.
If Yucca Mountain fails to become the nation's nuclear dump, no place else could be sited and the DOE will have to look at alternatives, Daniel Dreyfus, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said at the seventh annual International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference at The Mirage this week.
The conference drew 500 experts this year, compared to 800 last year.
"What we're testing here, in fact, is can we make geological storage acceptable in the United States," Dreyfus said.
"It is a societal decision and a very, very big one, a profound one," Dreyfus said of Yucca Mountain and the future of nuclear power.
Dreyfus hopes Congress will approve enough funding to finish studies and start licensing a dump at Yucca Mountain by 1999.
"We should finish the job," he said. "Then it's society's decision to do it or not."
That means drilling through Ghost Dance fault, a major crack running through the middle of the proposed site that the "Yucca mucker" tunnel boring machine has not reached, Dreyfus said.
The DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory discovered higher than expected levels of radioactive chlorine in five fractures at Yucca Mountain in the exploratory tunnel. "It's just data," Dreyfus said, noting more analysis and further samples have to be collected. "It implies more moisture moving in fractures."
By drilling into the heart of the mountain, a window will open to give scientists a larger picture of the site, he said.
Most important is securing a public safety margin for 300,000 years, Dreyfus said.
"How do you make a case for safety in that setting, not by relying on some people who wrote guidelines 10 years ago and didn't know what they were talking about," he said.
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