While the legislation leaves it up to the Energy Department to select one or more interim storage sites, a report accompanying the bill suggested the Energy Department's Savannah River weapons facility in South Carolina, the Hanford complex in Washington state, and a facility in Idaho as possible locations. It also said the department should consider other federal sites, including closed defense bases for temporary storage.
It calls on the energy secretary to produce a plan for interim storage four months after the bill becomes law and begin accepting waste before the end of next year. The legislation must still be considered by the Senate.
Washington and South Carolina lawmakers said that if their states are targeted, they feared the interim facilities could end up as permanent waste repositories. They worried that establishing interim waste dumps might reduce pressure to open Yucca Mountain.
''The state of Washington does not want to become . . . a nuclear waste dump more than we are already," said Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington.
The interim storage proposal arrives as concerns continue about delays in opening the proposed Yucca Mountain project in Nevada, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Last year a federal court questioned its proposed radiation protection plans. More recently concerns surfaced over allegations that government workers on the project falsified data.
The bill provides $661 million for continued development of the Yucca facility, which must still get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
In a separate development yesterday, a federal licensing board rejected Utah's appeal to thwart the stockpiling of spent nuclear fuel rods at an Indian reservation in that state. The ruling clears the way for the NRC to approve the project, which would create the temporary waste dump pending the opening of Yucca Mountain repository.
