Washington (Platts)--30Jan2008

Nevada's US congressional delegation has asked the Department of Labor
to help find jobs and provide transition funding for the more than 500
employees expected to be laid off this year from the US Department of Energy's
high-level nuclear waste disposal project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

In a Tuesday letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Democratic Senator
Harry Reid, Republican Senator John Ensign, Democratic Representative Shelley
Berkley, and Republican Represenatives Dean Heller and Jon Porter said that
while they want to kill the Yucca Mountain project, but they want to alleviate
some of the unintended consequences of the effort to stop the project.

Earlier this month, DOE's program director said at least 500 workers
would be laid off from the Yucca Mountain project this year because of steep
cuts to the program's fiscal 2008 budget.

DOE said most of the 500 layoffs would occur at facilities in Nevada,
while others would affect Yucca-related jobs at Sandia National Laboratories
in New Mexico and other states. The project employs about 2,400 people in
Nevada, New Mexico, California, Washington state and Colorado.

The lawmakers asked Chao to "make the necessary resources available for
rapid response to this situation and to ensure that these hardworking
individuals receive appropriate assistance for transitioning into new jobs."

They said Nevada has one of the country's highest unemployment rates at
5.8% and the state has been hit hard by problems in the US housing market.