WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush's pick to oversee the troubled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada said the country should move toward recycling - not just burying - spent nuclear fuel.

Edward "Ward" Sproat, a nuclear industry executive tapped to head the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, made the comments at his Energy Committee confirmation hearing Thursday.

"If the country decides to go and close the fuel cycle, go to full reprocessing like our original intent was back in the 1960s and early 1970s, the impact would be a significant reduction in the amount of high-level radioactive waste that would have to be disposed of in a deep geological repository," Sproat said in answering a question from Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.

"I personally believe it makes a lot of sense," Sproat said.

The United States abandoned reprocessing in the 1970s over fears the resulting plutonium could be seized by terrorists, but the Bush administration has proposed reviving the approach. Lawmakers this week agreed to spend $50 million on recycling initiatives in 2006, even as they cut the budget for the lagging Yucca Mountain project.

The project has been without a permanent director since Margaret Chu resigned in February. Since then two different acting directors have overseen Yucca Mountain as it suffered setbacks, including the disclosure of e-mails suggesting government scientists on the project falsified data.

Yucca Mountain is planned as a national repository for 77,000 tons of defense waste and used reactor fuel to be buried beneath the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The planned opening date of the project has been pushed from 2010 until 2012 at earliest.

One implication of the delays to Yucca Mountain is mounting liability for the government, which was obligated to begin accepting spent nuclear fuel from utilities in 1998. Sproat worked as an executive at the Philadelphia-area electric utility Peco Energy, which later merged with Exelon Corp. of Chicago, and he helped negotiate a multimillion-dollar settlement that was finalized in 2004 with the government over its failure to accept utilities' radioactive waste.

He told senators that even if the country starts recycling nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain will still be needed to expand the use of nuclear power.

"Nuclear energy must be a part of the energy mix for this country in the future," Sproat said.

The Energy Committee is expected to vote next week to approve Sproat's nomination and send it to the full Senate.