There is little chance the final appropriations bill covering the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission will provide any funding in fiscal 2019 for licensing the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada, one industry observer said Wednesday.
Lawmakers on the House-Senate conference committee for the “minibus” that would fund several agencies met Wednesday, but largely just to declare their priorities for the compromise version of their respective bills. The timeline for completion of the bill remained murky as of Wednesday. The House minibus would provide nearly $270 million to DOE and the NRC for licensing Yucca Mountain, the Senate measure offers nothing.
This week’s negotiations come less than a month before the end of the current fiscal year and two months before the Nov. 6 midterm election. Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, a vehement opponent of Yucca Mountain, is seen as one of the most endangered Republican lawmakers. Common wisdom has been that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is putting his foot on any legislation that promotes the waste facility to help safeguard Heller and the slim GOP majority in the Senate.
“I would be surprised if Yucca Mountain was included in there … only because we’re so close to the midterm election for Senator Dean Heller,” Victoria Napier, senior vice president for government and public affairs at Atkins, said at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit in Henderson, Nev. “It would seem somewhat myopic for them to put that in a bill, announce that, several weeks before an election.”
Katrina McMurrian, executive director of the nongovernmental Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, concurred that Yucca funding is unlikely in the minibus. But there is an opportunity for funding in the lame-duck session after the election if Congress is forced to pass short-term budgets to keep the federal government operating in the absence of a full-year plan once the fiscal year begins on Oct. 1, McMurrian said on a separate panel discussion.
