ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said Thursday that if the next president maintains the Obama administration’s anti-Yucca Mountain stance, it will be the final death knell for the nuclear waste geologic repository in Nevada.
“I suspect by this time next year we will have an indication of whether Yucca Mountain is going to proceed or not,” Simpson said at the DOE National Cleanup Workshop here. “If the new administration, whoever it is, comes in with, ‘We’re opposed to Yucca Mountain no matter what, and we’ll veto anything in it,’ as this administration has said, then I suspect that Yucca Mountain is going to be dead. I don’t think we can wait four more years to try to resolve this between the House and the Senate, between the administration and Republicans.”
Simpson, who chairs the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, said he would prefer that the Department of Energy pursue both Yucca Mountain and the interim nuclear waste storage efforts the Obama administration has drawn up to replace the Nevada project. He also discussed the divide between the House and Senate and an appropriations process that has stalled since 1994, the last time all appropriations bills were passed individually before the start of the fiscal year. Congress is now looking at a short-term continuing resolution through early December to give it enough time to approve a longer-term budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
The House energy and water spending for fiscal 2017 calls for $170 million to carry out Yucca Mountain licensing activities with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, while the Senate version is absent Yucca funding, instead proposing $61 million to help fund the Obama administration’s consent-based siting program for nuclear waste storage. Simpson discussed the reasoning behind his chamber’s stance.
“The House continues to put money into continuing the licensing of Yucca Mountain because A, it’s the law of the land, and B, because my energy commerce committee believes that if we go to interim storage and don’t continue funding Yucca Mountain, then Yucca Mountain will be gone,” Simpson said. “They won’t finish it. And so they’re very insistent that we don’t do interim storage if we don’t have money for Yucca Mountain.”
Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) discussed both Yucca Mountain and consent-based siting on Wednesday with Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz at a hearing on the future of nuclear power. Alexander voiced his support for Yucca Mountain, saying that science and the law support the facility. However, he also condemned the nuclear industry for getting in the way of interim storage efforts, echoing comments Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made in a letter to the Nuclear Energy Institute last week.
NEI, the nuclear industry’s legislative and governmental arm, suggested in public comments on consent-based siting in July that DOE not collaborate with private entities through the program, saying it would create unnecessary burdens for Waste Control Specialists and Holtec International, the companies behind current interim storage efforts for spent nuclear fuel.
“I thought it was a particularly boneheaded move on the part of the nuclear industry to kind of jerk the rug out of that effort by moving away from the idea that we have a chance to go for a short-term repository or a long-term repository or a private storage option or a defense option or a Yucca Mountain, that we ought to push on all of those paths,” Alexander said Wednesday.
Panel Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked Moniz if DOE is capable of moving forward with interim storage efforts without congressional approval. Moniz said that a government-operated facility would require congressional authorization, but DOE could move forward with contracting a private facility.
“If we wanted to try to move that rapidly on the timescale that some of the interested parties are talking about, in fact, we would want to start doing some additional activity, particularly on the transportation of the spent fuel side. That would require some additional funds, but there’s a lot we could do to move forward,” Moniz told Feinstein.
