By Tom Doggett

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Energy Department has applied for a license to operate a long-delayed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman announced on Tuesday.

Bodman said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will take about three years to review and decide whether to approve the license request for the Yucca Mountain storage facility, which was supposed to have opened in 1998. The earliest Yucca Mountain could open is 2020, the department said.

The Yucca Mountain storage site, about 90 miles from Las Vegas, has endured years of bureaucratic delays and scientific foul-ups. The government needs a license from the NRC to operate the fuel dump when it is ready.

"Submittal of the Yucca Mountain license application will further encourage the expansion of nuclear power in the United States, which is absolutely critical to our energy security, environmental goals, and national security," said Bodman.

"We are confident that the NRC's rigorous review process will confirm that the Yucca Mountain repository will provide for the safe disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste and will be protective of human health and the environment now and into the future," he added.

The department's license application runs 8,600 pages. "We are ready to get to work on this challenging review," said NRC Chairman Dale Klein.

Klein said his agency's review will involve more than 100 NRC staff and contractor employees. To meet the three-year deadline, he said Congress will to have to provide the NRC with an extra $40 million in the 2009 budget year to cover the cost of reviewing the license request.

However, many lawmakers in Congress are opposed to Yucca Mountain, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is from Nevada. Lawmakers could block money for the site. Reid told reporters on Tuesday that the storage project was "close to being dead."