AP News, March 27th, 2007
The head of the Yucca Mountain project said Wednesday that although 2017 is the goal for opening the Nevada nuclear waste dump, it will likely happen three or four years after that.
There could be more litigation and delays in getting construction authority from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Edward F. "Ward" Sproat, director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.
The program is already long delayed and the Energy Department keeps revising the opening date. The 2017 date was announced last summer; Sproat said he still hopes to make it.
Sproat warned lawmakers at a hearing that annual funding for Yucca must rise above the level it's been at for recent years _ around $500 million _ for the program to happen at all.
"If all we can do is continue to fund the repository at that level the repository will never be built, it will never happen," he told the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
Project managers already have had to adjust to getting $100 million less in the 2007 fiscal year than President Bush requested. The final 2007 figure was $444 million.
Once construction starts on the repository in the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas costs will soar past $1 billion per year, according to Energy Department projections.
With Yucca Mountain's toughest foe, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, running the Senate as majority leader, Sproat has been working hard to convince other lawmakers of the need to push the dump forward.
Yucca Mountain would be the first national repository for radioactive waste. It is meant to store at least 77,000 tons, but there are already roughly 50,000 tons waiting at reactor sites in dozens of states.
