By David Whitney - Bee Washington Bureau

A few years ago, the plan to store the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada seemed all but certain.

Congress decided that highly radioactive waste from commercial nuclear power plants, which takes centuries to decay, needed to be stored underground. And it voted by a wide margin in 2002 that Yucca Mountain, 100 miles from Las Vegas, was the place to build such a repository.

But after the Nov. 7 elections, which propelled Democrats into power on Capitol Hill, the plan is facing challenges.

Despite strong bipartisan support for Yucca Mountain in Congress, the incoming majority leader of the Senate, Nevadan Harry Reid, pledges that Yucca Mountain will never open. The incoming chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Californian Barbara Boxer, agrees. Both voted against the Yucca repository.

They say nuclear waste should stay right where it is - at the nation's nuclear power plants - at least until better waste technology comes along.

"There's no rush to put it someplace that's dangerous," Boxer said.

Opponents are raising questions over how safe the Yucca Mountain facility would be and whether transporting radioactive waste on roads and rail lines would pose unacceptable risks of accidents or terrorist attacks. More than 100 national and state environmental groups - including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council - coalesced in September behind a set of principles that include permanent storage of used fuel at the reactor sites.

"The problem is the concept that the public wants the waste moved," said Michele Boyd, the legislative director and nuclear expert at Public Citizen. "That's a 20-year-old concept."

The nuclear power industry is giving ground. It still wants Yucca Mountain opened, but it's willing to allow taxes that plant operators pay into a fund for Yucca Mountain to be used for interim storage, a euphemism for aboveground storage until a way is found to reprocess old fuel assemblies safely into new fuel.

Because of the long delay, plants already are turning to surface storage. At facilities such as Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo on California's scenic central coast, construction is well under way on thick concrete pads that eventually will hold concrete-encased steel containers where fuel assemblies would be entombed.

PG&E spokesman Shawn Cooper said the company was still hopeful that Yucca Mountain would open someday. But as long as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses cask storage, the waste could be there well into the next century, venting heat from the decaying fuel into the brisk Pacific Ocean winds. "It's called temporary dry-cask storage, but the canisters can hold the waste 100 years," he said.

Jill ZamEk, a leader of San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, was one of the signers of the environmentalists' principles in September. Mothers for Peace is fighting to force a rearrangement of the dry casks so that they'd better survive a terrorist attack, and the Supreme Court will decide soon whether to hear that case.

"We want Diablo Canyon plants shut down," ZamEk said. When it comes to the plant's waste, however, she said, "the risk of transporting it is so great it needs to stay where it is."

Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, whose district includes Diablo Canyon, agrees that the waste should stay put but with more security.

"I believe that we should actually be beefing up security against potential terrorism and improving safety to prevent accidents at all nuclear facilities around the country," she said in a statement.

Among Boxer's biggest concerns about Yucca Mountain is that it's not as impervious to water as initially thought. Sophisticated testing has shown that water percolates through its caverns and heads toward the Colorado River.

"Sixteen million Californians drink from that river," Boxer said.

Jon Summers, Reid's spokesman, said the senator would do all that he could to make sure Yucca Mountain never opened because the site was unsuitable. He said Reid had introduced legislation a year ago directing the Energy Department to take possession of the waste at the nation's nuclear plants and store it on site.

The bill went nowhere this year. The chairman of the Senate environment committee, James Inhofe, R-Okla., favors a Yucca Mountain repository. When the bill is reintroduced next year, however, Boxer will be heading the committee. She leans toward on-site storage but with the possibility of constructing regional or state gathering places for some of it, such as that at Rancho Seco where a reactor closed in 1989.

Boxer also favors research into reprocessing, something that environmentalists oppose.

Boxer said that if a way to reprocess nuclear waste safely could be found, it would help with the waste issue, produce new fuel for reactors and "make me feel more positive about nuclear power" as a pollution-free alternative for lowering greenhouse-gas emissions from oil-, natural gas- and coal-burning power plants.

Growing interest in building a new generation of nuclear plants since the enactment of an energy bill that offers generous government subsidies is driving the industry's shifting attitude about waste storage.

Since Congress began working on the energy bill, nearly three dozen applications for new reactors have been planned. The bill was signed into law in August 2005, touching off what Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., called a "nuclear renaissance."

"I am a pragmatist," Boxer said. "The vast majority of the members on my committee support nuclear power, and so do the majority in the Senate. So my focus is on safety, security and research, because I don't think there is any question that we are going to be seeing new plants."

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