Senate Nears Approval of Yucca Mountain Site

Paraphrased by Steve Waldrop
July 9, 2002

Washington- Utah's Republican Senators Robert Bennett and Orrin Hatch said that they will vote in favor of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, leaving the door open for congressional approval of the Nevada project.

The senators said the deciding factor in their decision was an agreement with U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to drop the proposal to make the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah a temporary storage area for nuclear waste until the Yucca Mountain site is ready.

Before the senator's announcement, Congress Daily reported Senate votes for the Yucca Mountain project at 50-50. South Carolina Senators Ernest Hollings and Strom Thurmond support the plan.

Bennett and Hatch said that using Skull Valley as a repository prompted them to be "undecided" on the issue. They pointed out the site's proximity to the Utah Test and Training Range, which includes a bombing range.

The Yucca Mountain project has been in planning for 20 years, and would establish an
underground repository for about 77,000 metric tons of nuclear waste accumulated by U.S. power plants, including those in Oconee and York counties and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

38 states including South Carolina would be affected by radioactive material transfer.