By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News

A U.S. House subcommittee has voted to increase funding for interim storage of high-level nuclear waste by $10 million, with the group's chairman expressing doubts about the viability of the planned Yucca Mountain permanent storage site.

Deciding to favor interim storage over permanent could amount to an acknowledgement that Yucca Mountain is far behind schedule.

The money would go to a U.S. Department of Energy interim facility, so the funding is not aimed at the industry-owned Private Fuel Storage site proposed for Skull Valley, Tooele County. But it doesn't preclude construction of the Tooele plant, raising the possibility of more than one temporary facility.

In addition, the markup by the House Energy and Water Developments Subcommittee torpedoed funding for developing the controversial "bunker-buster" nuclear weapon. Some Utahns worried that if the bunker buster were built it would be tested at the nearby Nevada Test Site.

The subcommittee, part of the House Committee on Appropriations, last week approved a $29.7 billion funding bill, to be debated by the full committee today. It would appropriate $661 million for Yucca Mountain.

A committee press release notes the amount is $84 million above the fiscal 2005 funding and "$10 million over the request" by the Bush administration.

The Yucca Mountain site is in trouble because of fierce opposition by a top Democrat, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and officials of the state of Nevada. Also, it has recently been slammed by scandal, including claims of falsifications involving scientific studies of the underground site's ability to withstand water erosion through the eons.

The chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, seemed to question whether Yucca Mountain remains viable. But he supported continuing to spend millions of dollars on the project.

However, the $10 million extra, according to the committee, would start moving "spent nuclear fuel away from reactor sites to an interim DOE (Department of Energy) storage facility."

That apparently excludes funding for the Private Fuel Storage site proposed for Skull Valley for the immediate purposes of the bill. PFS, awaiting licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is a private facility, not a DOE site.

In comments about the appropriations bill that wereposted on the committee's Web site, Hobson commented that the subcommittee did not fund Yucca Mountain as strongly as he would have liked.

"I don't like going forward with so little money for Yucca Mountain, but we are playing the hand that we were dealt," he said. Hobson added he remains "hopeful that the administration will come to its senses, or that the Senate will find a creative way to keep Yucca alive."

John Scofield, spokesman for the appropriations committee, told the Deseret Morning News that the $10 million was added to a like amount already in the bill, for a total of $20 million, "to expedite the storage of special nuclear materials at an interim facility." Special refers to high-level radioactive waste.

He said the bill does not specify which facility to use for the interim storage.

The subcommittee markup deleted funding for "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons research. Anti-nuclear activists had feared the weapons would be tested at the Nevada Test Site.

Vanessa Pierce of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah said the subcommittee trimmed $4 million for bunker-buster research, "which was the total amount that had been requested for it on the nuclear side."

Pierce added, "That is a huge victory."

She noted that a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences predicts that bunker-buster weapons used in warfare would kill many people other than those inside the underground fortresses they are designed to penetrate.

"If we use a bunker buster, there will be thousands to millions of innocent civilian casualties," said Pierce, HEAL's program director. "And that's not a fate we would wish for anyone."

Closer to home, Pierce said, if the weapon were developed "there's a chance it would be tested, and Utahns would be put at risk for being downwind a second time." By "second time," she was referring to the nuclear bombs detonated above ground at the Nevada Test Site during the 1950s and '60s, dumping radioactive fallout on Utah and other states.

Although the bunker buster would be designed for underground warfare, Utahns may be nervous because in the past venting has occurred at the Nevada Test Site.

In 1970, a 10 kiloton nuclear bomb in a test code-named Baneberry exploded 900 feet underground at the Test Site. It vented, with material breaking the surface. Baneberry spewed a cloud of radioactive debris into the atmosphere.

E-mail: bau@desnews.com