WASHINGTON — After the first wave of hearings on the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2019 budget, key House members still want to turn Yucca Mountain in Nevada into a permanent nuclear-waste repository as soon as possible, while key senators continue to hedge their bets.
On Thursday, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — which does not write DOE’s annual budget bills — said lawmakers in the lower chamber would mount another push to get a major Yucca Mountain policy bill to President Donald Trump’s desk.
“We will get Yucca Mountain legislation to the floor,” Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) told Energy Secretary Rick Perry in a hearing of his panel’s energy subcommittee.
That could happen as soon as June – specifically by Flag Day, June 14, Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), the bill’s author, told the House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus on Wednesday evening. “This is the time to strike,” Shimkus said. “This is our one shot.”
The measure includes a host of provisions to advance the project that has been decades in the making, including by speeding transfer of ownership for the federally owned Yucca site in Nevada to DOE from the Interior Department, and clarifying that the 147,000-acre site will be used, with a few exceptions, only for nuclear waste disposal.
During Thursday’s hearing, Shimkus noted a number of milestones in the nation’s decades-long effort to find a permanent place to put tens of thousands of tons nuclear waste. They included Jan. 31, 2018 — the 20th anniversary of the date by which DOE was supposed to begin accepting spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste for disposal. The department to date has not taken any of the waste.
Shimkus’ bill would also let DOE start work on an interim waste-storage site: a waystation where the agency could safely collect spent nuclear fuel now sitting idle at power plants across the country before sending the material to Nevada.
Interim storage is a priority for the Senate’s top Energy appropriator, who hours before Shimkus spoke on Wednesday urged DOE not to wait for Congress to approve Yucca before moving ahead on interim storage.
“The quickest, and probably the least expensive, way for the federal government to start to meet its used nuclear fuel obligations is for the Department of Energy to contract with a private storage facility for used nuclear fuel,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said in a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, which he chairs.
There are no such facilities now, but Holtec International is planning one, as is a team comprised of Orano and Waste Control Specialists.
Alexander hit the same notes about interim storage in the Senate’s first DOE budget hearing last year, too. This year, however, he was notably friendlier to Yucca, which he said “can and should be part of the solution to the nuclear waste stalemate.
“Federal law designates Yucca Mountain as the nation’s repository for used nuclear fuel, and the [Nuclear Regulatory] Commission’s own scientists have told us that we can safely store nuclear waste there for up to one million years,” Alexander said, reading from prepared remarks.
What Alexander did not say this week was whether the 2019 DOE spending bill his subcommittee will eventually produce would give DOE the $110 million it requested to resume its application to license Yucca Mountain with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The department is also seeking $10 million to advance interim storage.
What Alexander did say, just like last year, is that he planned to reintroduce legislation to create a new federal agency dedicated to nuclear waste storage. The last such bill, filed in 2015, was co-sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore). It did not get past the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and it contained the Barack Obama administration’s consent-based siting approach to nuclear-waste storage.
The nuclear power industry views consent-based siting — under which no nuclear waste repositories would be built in any location disagreeable to state, local, and tribal governments nearby it — as a kiss of death for Yucca Mountain, which although authorized by Congress is bitterly opposed by Nevada’s state government.
Whatever happens in the subcommittee Alexander chairs, Yucca still has a mountain to climb in the form of Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) — the project’s most powerful opponent on Capitol Hill. Heller has pledged the Senate will never fund Yucca Mountain.
ExchangeMonitor Reporter Wayne Barber contributed to this story from Washington.
