Bryan, Reid ready for nuclear fight

Benjamin Grove covers Washington for the Sun. He can be reached at (202) 628-3100, ext. 269 or by e-mail at [email protected].

The 100-member Senate this week is scheduled to debate and vote on a bill that would bring nuclear waste to Nevada by 2007.

Before the bill becomes law, the 435-member House would have to pass its version of the bill.

However, the House bill as it stands is much different than the Senate bill: It includes a provision that allows for temporary storage of nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site.

A conference committee made up of members from both chambers would be used to resolve differences between House and Senate bills.

If the conference committee drafted a compromise bill, both chambers would vote again on the new bill, and the bill would proceed to the president for signature or veto.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., has been fighting to keep nuclear waste out of Nevada for much of his political career. This week the retiring lawmaker, former governor and boxing fan faces another "title bout."

"This is a heavyweight matchup," Bryan said.

The long history of a plan to bury nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will take another turn Tuesday and Wednesday when the Senate is scheduled to debate a Yucca-related bill.

Inside the offices of Bryan and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., harried staffers have been preparing for this battle since Congress reconvened Jan. 24. A glimpse into what one staffer jokingly calls their "foxhole" paints a picture of the debate to come.

"It will be guerrilla warfare," said Jimmy Ryan, legislative director and legal counsel for Reid. "You do everything you can to alter the bill's shape on the floor in debate and come up with amendments that will make it less evil."

Reid and Bryan will face off against Sens. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, the leading supporters of Senate Bill 1287. The bill establishes rules for shipping 77,000 tons of nuclear waste, from nuclear power plants and defense activities nationwide, to Nevada beginning in 2007.

Murkowski has had difficulty winning Senate approval for his bill, in large part because his early bill drafts required the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to set radiation standards.

The NRC has said people living near Yucca Mountain should be exposed to no more than 25 millirem of radiation a year.

But Reid, Bryan and President Clinton support the Environmental Protection Agency's stricter 15-millirem standard. Clinton threatened to veto Murkowski's bill.

So Murkowski worked furiously last week to craft a bill the Senate and Clinton would approve. Late last week Murkowski sent Bryan and Reid advance copies of a bill that seems to give the EPA lead authority for setting standards.

The move capped an anxious week in the Bryan and Reid camps as they scrambled to map out debate strategies.

"We've spent a lot of time just trying to get the latest information about the bill," Bryan legislative staffer Joseph Barry said. "We have to keep our eye on what the state of the play is."

Barry, who is leaving Bryan this month to take another job, is the senator's resident nuclear waste expert. He spends much of his time researching waste storage. Barry also spends hours on the phone with other aides in Reid's office, the White House, the Department of Energy, the EPA and environmental lobby groups, assessing the bill's friends and foes.

Barry, along with legislative assistant Brock Richter, legislative director Brent Heberlee and Chief of Staff Jean Neal, are assembling the nuts and bolts of Bryan's debate plan.

Barry, Richter and Heberlee work in a kind of nuclear waste war room in Bryan's Capitol Hill office suite. Stacks of paper are piled outside several bookcases and filing cabinets that are already stuffed with Yucca materials. A closet stores about 35 maps, graphs and charts, some frayed from use on the Senate floor, where Bryan in past debates has tried to illustrate that storing waste in Nevada is a bad idea.

Last week Bryan met roughly four times a day with staffers to discuss the latest versions of the Yucca bill, Neal said.

Bryan, Reid, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., the top Democrat on Murkowski's Energy committee, met early last week to discuss the upcoming fracas.

"It's been tense," Neal said.

In a typical huddle late Thursday afternoon, Bryan met for a brief chat with Neal and Richter to talk radiation standards. They discussed a point Bryan wants to raise in debate: low-level waste stored at a dump in New Mexico known as WIPP must meet the EPA's 15-millirem standard.

"Our argument has always been that don't the good people of Nevada deserve the same standards of public health and safety?" Bryan asks, repeating a line he has delivered countless times.

After more than 11 years in the Senate, Bryan can make the arguments against the bill in his sleep, staffers say.

Still, they keep a black, three-inch binder stocked with pages of the latest Yucca research for the senator's reference during floor debate.

Thirteen tabs separate the pages with labels like "NRC actions 1999," "Letters: opposition S. 1287" and "Transportation Fact Sheets."

Reid has an identical black binder that several staffers say is "like a playbook."

Reid also will refer to a two-page outline of arguments he plans to make against the bill, drafted by legislative assistant Kai Anderson, who closely follows the nuclear waste bill for the senator. The document serves as a preview of the debate to come. It asserts that the bill:

Reid's staff sent a copy of the document to every Senate office, even though they know where just about every senator stands on the issue.

Still, the staffers are busy trying to determine who supports the latest version of the bill and who will vote with Reid and Bryan against it.

When debate is done, Reid and Bryan will cast votes against the bill that establishes guidelines for burying waste in Nevada.

"Short of Murkowski saying, 'We're not going to stick it to Nevada, and we're going to keep it all on site (at the nuclear power plants), we're going to vote against this bill," Ryan said.

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