The Senate unveiled its appropriations bill this week and Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) got what they asked for: No Yucca Mountain funding this year.
The U.S. senators wrote a letter in opposition to the facility to the Senate committee tasked with appropriating the funds Nov. 6.
“The Yucca Mountain site is both a geologically and geographically unfit site to house the nation’s nuclear waste, and its selection as the nation’s sole high-level nuclear waste repository was the result of a flawed decision-making process that ignored science and the will of the state,” the senators wrote in the letter to the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee. “Nevada will not agree to house the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste.”
The note, addressed to outgoing subcommittee Chair Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), asked that no funds be appropriated to the Department of Energy or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to support the licensing of what is still the only legally designated, permanent nuclear-waste repository in the country.
Cortez Masto and Rosen, in Nevada tradition, have both spoken out against Yucca many times before. In 2018, the duo sent a similar letter to Feinstein, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The Nevada senators say they support consent-based siting, in which state and local leaders and community members surrounding a nuclear waste repository site must agree to its construction there. Such a process is “the only viable path forward to guarantee the responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and our nation’s nuclear waste,” the Senators have said.
Five weeks into the 2021 fiscal year, Congress has yet to pass a permanent 2021 budget and is operating under a continuing resolution that freezes budgets at 2020 levels until Dec. 11. No money was included for Yucca Mountain in last year’s budget, and none has been approved for this year’s budget yet.
When President-elect Joe Biden enters the White House in January, the Senate will have a razor-thin margin in favor of either the Democrats or the Republicans, depending on who wins Georgia’s runoff races.
At the state level, Nevada lawmakers have almost always opposed licensing Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for civilian- and defense-nuclear waste. The Obama administration halted the Yucca licensing process started by the George W. Bush administration, and the Donald Trump administration gave up on restarting the process as part of Trump’s effort to court Nevada’s votes in the presidential election he just lost.
