WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy proposed a $494.7 million budget for Yucca Mountain Monday and braced for another year of defending the project against newly energized critics in Congress.

The budget is almost exactly the same amount that DOE requested last year to continue work on the nuclear waste repository it wants to build in Nevada. It was less than half of the $1.2 billion that Yucca project managers once told lawmakers would be necessary at this point to keep the project on a preferred schedule.

But after a series of years in which Congress has slashed Yucca spending, officials Monday characterized their fiscal 2009 request as a realistic one.

"We intend to move ahead," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at a briefing on the final DOE budget of the Bush administration. The budget "demonstrates, we believe, our commitment to this project."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was resharpening his axe for the repository, several months after engineering a deep cut that prompted several hundred job layoffs and schedule delays that are still being calculated.

"Despite the fact Congress cut his proposal by $108 million last year, President Bush requested $495 million again this year," Reid said. "Clearly, he will not get that funding."

"On Yucca Mountain, the president's budget request will not be met," added Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.

DOE has all but officially written off a planned June deadline to apply for a repository construction license. Bodman said Monday the license application now would be completed sometime in 2008.

Ward Sproat, project director as head of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said he would present Congress with new project schedules this spring.

"We put together a budget that is relatively flat," Sproat said. "What we are saying is that this is enough to move the program forward but not forward on the quickest plan."

Previously, DOE's "best-case" outlook had Yucca Mountain open and accepting nuclear waste by 2017. A new schedule could push that back by five years or more, and some experts say the opening date could be even further in the future.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said support in Congress will erode the longer the repository is delayed.

"The chance that Yucca Mountain will open before 2020 fades like a Nevada sunset," Berkley said. "President Bush is dreaming if he thinks Congress is going to waste another $495 million dollars on his plan to turn Nevada into a nuclear waste dump."

Within the DOE's latest request, $262 million would be allocated to designing the industrial complex where waste canisters would be handled prior to being rolled into storage tunnels within the mountain.

Another $82.7 million would pay for technicians and lawyers to take part in the license application process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

DOE designs for a nuclear waste railroad across rural Nevada to the repository would be budgeted for $10 million.