Anger over high gasoline prices and the Obama administration's abandonment of a plan to build a nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain, Nev., dominated a debate yesterday over the Energy Department's 2013 budget proposal.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu defended his proposal to increase DOE's budget to $27.2 billion while shifting money away from nuclear energy and fossil fuels at a hearing of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee.

The budget proposal for fiscal 2013 would give a double-digit boost to DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy while slashing funding for nuclear reactor research, carbon capture funding for coal-burning power plants and other programs focused on fossil fuels.

In recent days, President Obama and his top officials have waged a war of words with Republican leadership over the administration's policies as gasoline has started selling at unusually high prices for the wintertime. Republicans, hoping to seize on frustration at the pump, tried to paint the willingness to cut funding for those types of programs as out of touch.

"How does your budget relate to the real world outside of Washington where energy costs are eating up family budgets?" subcommittee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) asked yesterday.

Chu said the agency has not stood in the way of oil and gas drilling, noting that domestic oil and gas production has increased in the past few years. He said DOE will continue to fund promising but unproven ways of reaching fossil fuels, such as the technology to extract natural-gas-filled ice crystals called methane hydrates from underground seams and the ocean floor, even as the agency pursues policies to make vehicles more efficient and able to run on different fuels.

"We're very focused on that, because we understand the impact it has on all Americans, and our economy," Chu said. "The overall goal is to decrease our dependence on oil, to build and strengthen our economy, and to decrease our dependence on oil."

And in comments to reporters after the hearing, Chu echoed a point made earlier in the day by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, saying that the administration may eventually decide to open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The reserve is meant to deal with a supply interruption like the one that stemmed from the revolution in Libya, Chu said, and now the administration is "very concerned" about what is happening in Iran.

"We are looking at that, and we are looking at all the ways we can possibly do this," Chu said. "Nothing final has been done, but we are considering all these tools to try to moderate prices."

Eyes on Yucca Mountain

Both the Democratic and Republican supporters of building a repository at Yucca Mountain pressed Chu yesterday on the Obama administration's abandonment of the project.

Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission delivered a report last month that urged the administration to start looking for new places to store the waste from the nation's 104 nuclear reactors. It said the administration should have local support for any temporary storage sites and long-term repositories -- unlike Yucca Mountain, which faces vociferous opposition from many Nevadans and has a powerful political adversary in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

DOE has put together an internal working group to come up with a plan, but Obama's budget did not include any money for Yucca Mountain. While the House passed a spending bill last year that included $10 million for a federal study of the Yucca Mountain repository, the Senate-approved bill did not, due in part to Reid's objections.

Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, took issue with the decision to leave the project without funding. He asked Chu to estimate how much funding the project would need. When Chu said he would need to reply at a later time, Dicks interjected and said the project would need about $100 million in the upcoming year's budget.

Dicks' home state of Washington includes the largest nuclear waste site in the country, at the former nuclear weapons production site in Hanford.

He predicted that the Obama administration will lose the court case brought by states that have paid money for the repository and have had to deal with their plants' nuclear waste in the absence of a permanent resting place.

"I can't believe the courts are going to sustain your position, so you better start looking at these alternatives," Dicks told Chu. "You better figure out how you're going to get Yucca Mountain moving forward. You just can't declare something in the executive branch, that it's no longer the law. You've got to come to Congress and get the law changed. That hasn't happened."

Chu said DOE will wait for the court ruling before it decides its next course of action.

"We know that those are very serious legal obligations," he said.