WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration says it is willing to store temporarily nuclear power plant waste somewhere other than the delayed Yucca Mountain project in Nevada but needs congressional approval to do so.

Paul Golan, the Energy Department official in charge of the project, said the department ''continues to have an open mind about interim storage'' of the thousands of tons of used reactor fuel now kept at nuclear power plants in 31 states.

Golan noted at a Senate hearing Tuesday that $30 million has been included in a House appropriations bill for examining temporary acceptance of some of the waste, pending the completion of the Nevada facility.

The nuclear industry and government officials have talked of putting some of the waste at federal facilities run by the Energy Department as part of its nuclear weapons program.

Golan, talking to reporters after he testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, decline to suggest an interim site, saying that's a decision ''that's going to have to involve a public dialogue.''

The federal government is obligated under contractual agreement with individual utilities to take the used reactor fuel. A federal storage site was to have been available by 1998.

The Yucca Mountain facility, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, won't meet a 2010 completion target and is years behind schedule. Golan declined to give a completion date or even a target of when the department will submit a license for the waste dump to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

A schedule and strategy for a license application will be made this summer, he said.

Even if the dump opened in 2010 - which had been the target up until a few years ago - the government could be liable for $2 billion to $3 billion in damages ''and the liability will grow'' for any additional delays, Golan said.

Several senators were sharply critical of the long delays in the Yucca facility, which was given a final go-ahead by Congress in 2002.

Utilities have paid $18 billion into a nuclear waste fund in anticipation the government would take the waste, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., complained, ''and there still isn't a canister in the ground.''

Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., blamed Nevada officials - who have vigorously fought the Yucca project in court and in Congress - for the delays and directed his criticism at Robert Loux, head of the state agency that has spearheaded the fight against the waste dump.

''Flogging Nevada certainly isn't the answer,'' Loux later told reporters. ''I believe any state would do the same thing'' if asked to accept the nation's nuclear waste.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the committee's chairman and among the biggest boosters of nuclear power in Congress, suggested the Yucca design may already be outdated and irrelevant in light of the administration's desire to return to reprocessing nuclear fuel.

''Confusion is rampant and the time frames are all out of whack,'' said Domenici.

If fuel reprocessing - or recycling, as Domenici and the administration prefer to call it - becomes reality, ''we will need a completely different Yucca Mountain,'' he said.

If fuel is recycled, a repository no longer will have to hold complete fuel rods, including the isotopes that will remain dangerous for a million years. Instead it will be used to dispose of material that will lose its radioactivity in a few hundred years.

The administration plan for Yucca at this time assumes no design change to accommodate reprocessing, said Golan, even as he acknowledged that the proposed facility - which is being designed to hold 77,000 tons of waste - will fall short of what will be needed.

The Energy Department has begun making preliminary assessments about a second repository. Golan said there are more than 50,000 tons of used reactor fuel at power plants today and that amount will double during the lifetime of the operating reactors.

Nevada long has argued that it has no confidence the Energy Department will develop a safe and environmentally protective waste repository.

Golan said there is ''a strong international scientific consensus that the best and safest option for dealing with this waste is geologic isolation'' and that the volcanic ridge at Yucca Mountain is suitable for such a repository.

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