WASHINGTON -- With the Yucca Mountain project being resized due to budget cuts, an Energy Department official on Monday cast more doubt on the government meeting a June 30 goal to apply for a nuclear waste repository license.

Contractors are rewriting their work plans after Congress slashed $108 million from the Department of Energy's 2008 budget, said Ward Sproat. He said more workers will lose jobs as the project is reconfigured.

Sproat, director of the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said he would not yet write off the June goal. But in an interview, he suggested the date was unlikely and could slip.

"I don't know if we will be able to make June 30 or not," Sproat said. "I am cautiously optimistic that we could get an LA (license application) in some time during calendar year 2008."

Energy Department officials have conceded the budget cut engineered late last year by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., struck a big blow to the project that already is 10 years behind schedule. Reid and other Nevada leaders say the repository for 70,000 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel will be flawed and unsafe and should be stopped.

The Bush administration requested $494.5 million for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Congress in December approved $386.5 million.

"That is a major cut in the program and it hurts, and it is impacting us severely," Sproat said.

Major contractors including Bechtel SAIC Co. and Sandia National Laboratories will report in six to eight weeks how they would absorb the loss, and whether a June application is out of the question, Sproat said.

"We have got a program of still a couple thousand people spread over five or six states looking at this," Sproat said. "Some of the work is coming to completion and some of it is still underway. I don't know yet when it will all come together."

In a license application expected to number thousands of pages, the Energy Department would venture to show that nuclear waste could be handled safely at the Yucca site and buried within the mountain for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Energy Department had advertised its June goal to Congress and to the nuclear industry in a bid to show that new managers including Sproat were turning around the program. Sproat, a former industry executive, was appointed in May 2006.

But, Sproat said, "The rules got changed in the middle of the game." He said Congress failed to supply adequate funding "six months from the finish line."

Bob Loux, a critic of the project and head of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, said DOE blaming Congress "is an easy way out." He contended a well-run program would not have been rushing to make deadlines.

"It is a convenient scapegoat but (DOE) has missed almost every deadline they have ever established," Loux said.

If DOE pushed back a licensing date beyond June, "I don't think many people will be really surprised," Loux said. "On the other hand, they went so far out on that date there will be a fair lot of repercussions. I think it will further erode any remaining support on Capitol Hill and in the industry."

There already have been several rounds of job cuts. Most recently, Bechtel SAIC Co. virtually shut down operations at the repository study area, giving layoff notices last week to 63 workers who were maintaining the site 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The mouth of the 25-foot-diameter exploratory tunnel has been fenced off and a skeleton crew of fewer than a dozen workers will maintain the site on standby, monitoring plumbing, ventilation and electrical equipment.

Several other smaller contractors also have cut staff, but Sproat said Monday he did not have details, and other DOE officials could not provide more information.

Sproat's comments came in advance of two presentations he is scheduled to deliver this week in Las Vegas.

On Tuesday, the DOE official will address the Nevada state legislature Committee on High Level Radioactive Waste in a 9:30 a.m. meeting at the Grant Sawyer State Office Building on East Washington Avenue.

On Wednesday, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an expert panel that reports to Congress, will meet at 8 a.m. at the Marriott Suites Convention Center hotel on Convention Center Drive.