Private Fuel Storage, a licensed nuclear waste storage site on Goshute Indian Reservation land in Tooele County, has asked the Energy Department to pay to move commercial spent fuel to the site and is still talking with utilities to see if any would be interested in helping finance the project. Several original investors backed out last year and the site still faces transportation obstacles.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has repeatedly said that PFS is not part of the department's overall strategy for handling nuclear waste. It is not clear if an approval by Congress to go ahead with interim storage could change that strategy.

The Energy Department was supposed to take nuclear power plant waste in 1998 and put it into the Yucca Mountain repository planned for 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Nuclear power users pay a fee for their electricity that goes into a special fund designed specifically to pay for the storage site.

But Yucca remains far from finished so the nuclear utilities have sued the department for the delay. The department estimates that every year Yucca is delayed beyond its subsequent 2010 opening date, it will cost the federal government $1 billion per year "with a conservative estimate of $500 million in legal liability and $500 million to monitor and guard defense spent fuel and high level radioactive waste at DOE sites," according to the report.

Hobson said after Wednesday's meeting that the department should put out a request for proposals and see who would be interested in storing the waste. The request could be for interim storage itself or for part of the administration's new plan to reprocess used nuclear fuel through the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Hobson stressed that he wants any interim storage program to be integrated with a reprocessing effort.

"In this committee's view, if any site refuses to provide interim storage as needed to support the operation of an integrated recycling facility, at whatever scale, then that site should be eliminated from all further consideration under GNEP," according to the report.

The committee approved an amendment offered by Rep. Peter Visclosky, D-Ohio, that slashed an additional $30 million from GNEP and put it toward funding for energy conservation and weatherization activities. The administration asked for $250 million to fund GNEP activities. The bill originally contained $150 million, but that amendment dropped it to $120 million.

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E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com