The House Energy and Commerce Committee pushed back by at least one day its review of legislation intended to jump-start centralized storage and ultimately disposal of radioactive waste now dispersed around the country.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019, from Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), was one of 18 bills scheduled for markup on Tuesday. But the committee called it a day after four hours of debate and votes on just two measures.
Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said the panel would reconvene this afternoon to consider the remaining bills.
McNerney’s bill updates legislation filed by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) in the last Congress, which never got a vote in the Senate after advancing out of the House in 2018 in a 340-72 vote.
The bill would make a set of amendments to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which put the Department of Energy in charge of disposal of used fuel from nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations.
Among them: permanent withdrawal of the federal Yucca Mountain property in Nevada for DOE use as a permanent repository for the waste; prioritizing use of the land for the disposal project; and increasing the legal maximum disposal from 70,000 metric tons to 110,000 metric tons.
The McNerney legislation would also authorize DOE to develop one or more “monitored retrievable storage” facilities that could hold used fuel from nuclear power plants until the repository is ready.
“Our country has a dangerous buildup of inadequately secured nuclear waste, which puts communities at risk and prevents us from fully integrating nuclear power into our emissions reducing agenda,” McNerney said in his opening comments to the meeting. “If we’re to address the climate crisis with the urgency it requires it’s imperative that we act to resolve the nuclear waste issue in a bipartisan manner.”
Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) expressed concern about promoting interim storage of spent fuel while the future of the repository remains in doubt. New Jersey-based energy technology company Holtec International is seeking a federal license to build and operate a consolidated interim storage facility in southeastern New Mexico.
