The chairwoman of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee hopes to craft legislation to revamp the nation's nuclear waste policies that have led to an impasse over the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she fully supports a presidential commission's advice that Congress and the Obama administration get busy finding sites to store and dispose of nuclear waste.

President Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission last week released its final recommendations, which are the subject of two hearings in the House and Senate this week (Greenwire, Jan. 26).

"I am very supportive of their findings and what we're trying to do right now is move in that direction," Feinstein said. "How we do that is undecided."

Feinstein is currently working with Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the ranking member of the subcommittee, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the committee's ranking Republican, on finding a nuclear waste solution this year.

Feinstein said she is looking for a legislative solution and will speak with Bingaman and Murkowski after the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hears from the Blue Ribbon Commission's co-chairmen -- former White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- tomorrow.

"I want to see what the reaction is from that hearing, and then hopefully Bingaman, Murkowski, Alexander and me can kind of become a team to agree on legislation and move it through," she said.

Feinstein said she believes the federal government should follow the commission's advice to establish an independent corporation to oversee the siting of one or more permanent geologic disposal facilities and one or more consolidated storage facilities. All sites should be found and approved through an adaptive, staged and consent-based approach, the commission said.

Congress should also move past the idea of Yucca Mountain as an option instead of wasting time on it, she said. The Obama administration abandoned the site and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has since halted its review of DOE's application to build and operate the repository.

She also agreed with the commission's recommendation that Congress ensure any site is accepted by the surrounding community and an independent body be created to oversee the process. "We need to create a governing body separate from government and that body controls the money," she said.

The new corporation would establish the parameters of a new nationwide search for nuclear waste interim storage facilities and permanent deep geologic repositories, and geology and community support will be key to the search, she said.

"Land with water under is bad, land with salt under is good," Feinstein said.

The chairwoman said she hopes the fact that her working group is bipartisan will overcome deep political divides that currently plague Congress. The issue, she said, is urgent because the government will owe utilities about $20 billion by 2020 for failing to take waste from nuclear power plants across the country.

"I think it's $500 million now but it grows, so we have to get cracking on it," she said.

Eyes still on Yucca

Despite the inertia in the Senate, House Republicans have been quick to warn lawmakers against abandoning Yucca Mountain and say the report's call for one or more deep geologic repositories highlights the site's importance.

House Environment and the Economy Subcommittee Chairman John Shimkus (R-Ill.) told The Hill yesterday that the project remains the "most shovel-ready, thoroughly studied geological repository for spent nuclear fuel."

Opponents of Yucca Mountain "advocate abandoning this site ... for purely political purposes," he said. "Thirty years of scientific study, $15 billion, and, quite frankly, common sense, support the current requirement to secure high-level nuclear waste on federal property, under a mountain, in a desert," he said.

Shimkus called on NRC to finish reviewing the Nevada site and move forward with building Yucca Mountain.