By PHILLIP GOMEZ

Nye County's Washington, D.C., lobbyist in charge of steering federal benefits to the host county for the Yucca Mountain project told Nye County Commissioners, staff and consultants Monday that adequate congressional funding for the proposed nuclear waste repository was dead on arrival for 2006 with little hope for improved prospects as the year wears on.

Richard L. Spees, the Akerman-Senterfitt consultant whom Nye County pays $150,000 a year, plus expenses, to keep it informed and to lobby for Yucca-related pork, painted a dismal picture of the prospects for getting the waylaid repository back on track any time soon.

"In the big picture this year, Yucca Mountain is way behind and way over budget," Spees said in the small commissioners' conference room on East Basin Avenue. "Nothing is getting done, and everyone's saying it's broken and we've got to fix it."

The "fix" has Yucca advocates more than a little concerned. A new Bush administration initiative, to be announced in the president's state of the union address on Tuesday, will seek up to $400 million from Congress for research and development of the Department of Energy's secretive GNEI program, an international plan the acronym for which stands for Global Nuclear Energy Initiative.

The program's goals are feared to take federal funds away from the stalled - some would say derailed - Yucca Mountain project, as new reprocessing facilities for recycling spent nuclear fuel are constructed elsewhere in the nation.

The idea behind GNEI is to get rid of the nation's overload of nuclear waste, found across 39 states in spent fuel rods and intended, until now, for the future Yucca Mountain Repository.

Next week, the president will propose giving the product to developing countries like China and India, which desperately want the fuel for the nuclear power plants they are busy constructing.

"Energy Washington Week," an online national energy policy news service, reported more than a week ago, "GNEI is the major component of the administration's reprocessing initiative. It is viewed as an international plan that will allow emerging economies access to much-needed ... fuel without giving those countries the right to process the fuel, because that will be done elsewhere."

The report notes, "A byproduct of reprocessing is weapons-grade plutonium," which the plan wants to keep out of the hands of countries that don't already have it. It would mean creating in the U.S. nuclear fuel reprocessing plants like the ones in France, and initiating a competitive process for selection of a site or sites to construct the recycling facilities.

The DOE, which administers the Yucca Mountain site, is expected to ask Congress for $250 million for the GNEI program and up to $400 million for fuel reprocessing R&D.

Back at the Nye County Commission chambers, Spees said the president will only ask for $250 million in the FY 2007 budget for continued operations at Yucca Mountain, well below the amount asked for in previous years. That would not be enough even to shut down the facility - in fact, only half as much as needed for that task, he said.

In FY 2006 the president asked Congress for $651 million for the Yucca project.

Further legislation might come along in March, Spees said, but he clearly indicated that the mid-term congressional elections would further hamper focused discussion of funding for the nuclear repository.

"I think we're absolutely stalled," he said. "There might be a bill passed through by the end of the year ... People (in Congress and in the Bush administration) are just disgusted at how much money and how long it has taken with the delays in getting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve their license application.

"They can't even get their records certified," Spees caricatured administration officials saying. "They're thinking, 'Let's do something different.' There's significant opposition (to Yucca Mountain) from a lot of people.

"If you're an opponent, you couldn't dream up a scenario like what happened," Spees said of the certification fiascoes that occurred last year. He concluded, "DOE mishandled it."

Nevertheless, Spees said it was "very important for Nye County to be involved in working to keep Yucca Mountain on track." He said he believed Congress will rewrite portions of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act next session, which could affect the revenue Nye County garners as the host site for the repository.

The administration's new fuel reprocessing initiative signals a dramatic shift in U.S. nuclear policy, according to the Energy Washington Weekly. The initiative is "seen as a stop-gap waste plan while officials deal with issues causing Yucca Mountain's massive delays."

Administration sources say the initiative will not replace the Yucca project, but will complement it by eliminating the sheer volume of waste so that less storage space is necessary, according to the report.

So much waste is anticipated that it is widely believed a second repository would be needed. That is due to the growing amount of already spent nuclear fuel and the projected growth of new power plants producing additional waste.

Spees called for Nye County to be involved in the political process "to restructure the nuclear program of the country."

Last November the county commissioners renewed Spees' contract after expressed skepticism from some commissioners about the firm's handling of the job.

Yet the contract was renewed, and at an increased price. That was due, in the words of Commissioner Joni Eastley, who wrote the agenda description, to the fact that "efforts are underway to restructure the entire Yucca Mountain program next year. When that happens," she said, "representational lobbying activities will increase significantly, and the principals expect to travel to Nye County more often ... If the restructuring attempts are successful, it could result in major changes for Nye County, including bigger benefits."

Or no benefits at all.

The president's bill, Spees said candidly, "is not going to stand or fall depending on whether it has Nye County's support."

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