A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Thursday advanced legislation intended to bring the U.S. government closer to finally removing nuclear waste from dozens of sites around the nation and then ultimately burying it in a geologic repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev.
In a unanimous voice vote, the environment and climate change subcommittee sent the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019 to the full panel for further consideration. The bill filed by Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) was the last of 15 pieces of legislation to be marked up during the session.
“The bill reflects the considerable work on this committee to establish a workable path to restart the Yucca license processing while maintaining permanent disposal as a cornerstone of our national policy,” subcommittee Ranking Member John Shimkus (R-Ill.) said in his opening remarks to the markup. “This bill reflects the bipartisan compromise to authorize the Department of Energy to move forward with the temporary storage program and to contract a private company for this purpose.”
Among the measures of H.R. 2699:
- Transferring the federal property to be used for the repository to the direct control of the Department of Energy.
- Raising the legal capacity limit at the repository from 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel to 110,000 metric tons.
- Allowing the Energy Department to ship used fuel to a privately operated interim storage site that has been licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
- Increasing the amounts of payments to host communities both for interim storage and a repository.
There was no schedule as of Thursday for the full committee to take up the bill, a spokesperson said.
Almost as soon as they began operating, U.S. nuclear power plants began generating waste – most notably radioactive used fuel assemblies from their reactors. More than 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel is now held on dry storage pads at nuclear facilities in more than 30 states.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act put the Department of Energy in charge of disposal of U.S. spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste – with a Jan. 31, 1998, deadline to begin taking the material. The law was amended five years later to designate Yucca Mountain, a patch of federally owned land in the desert about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the site for the repository.
The Energy Department filed its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008, during the George W. Bush administration, but President Barack Obama defunded the proceeding in 2010. The Obama administration’s “consent-based” approach for siting waste disposal, based on recommendations from a blue-ribbon panel of experts, did not get beyond a draft plan before President Donald Trump took office in 2017 and turned back to Yucca Mountain as the solution for nuclear waste.
The McNerney legislation is an updated version of a bill that Shimkus stewarded through committee and floor votes in the House during the last Congress, only to see it die without any action in the Senate. That did not go unnoticed during Thursday’s hearing.
“I challenge the United States Senate to take this bill up,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said ahead of the vote, noting his state houses seven nuclear reactors at four plants.
Shimkus is perhaps the No. 1 advocate for Yucca Mountain on Capitol Hill. But this could be his among his last opportunities to move the project forward, as the veteran congressman said last month he would not run for re-election in 2020.
Lawmakers raised well-worn talking points in discussing their support for the legislation during the markup: stranded used fuel is a major obstacle to deployment of new nuclear power technologies; Yucca Mountain is the law of the land on nuclear waste disposal; the United States has already spent $15 billion on research and development of the repository, with little to show for it.
Some subcommittee members focused their comments on the general need to end the United States’ long impasse in dealing with its radioactive waste, but Duncan and others left little doubt they believe it should go to Yucca Mountain.
Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), whose district is adjacent to the retired San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County, noted he joined a congressional delegation to Yucca Mountain in August. Peters said that, after hours of asking questions, he was “encouraged by the scientific and legal footing on which the Yucca site stands.”
“This site was chosen based on facts around seismology, geological acceptability, a 1,600-foot natural buffer from water contamination, and many more (standards),” Peters said. “I know it is of concern to our friends in Nevada, I think we should take that seriously, but I also know that this is the perfect place to be stored on behalf of our country.”
No lawmaker from Nevada spoke at the hearing. The congressional delegation remains firmly opposed to making Nevada home to other states’ radioactive waste.
Subcommittee members did not propose any amendments to the bill, though Peters and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) suggested they could add some as the legislation proceeds.
Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) alone criticized the McNerney bill, upbraiding subcommittee leaders for not also bringing up her STORE Nuclear Fuel Act for markup. That measure, which Matsui filed in June, is intended to push forward consolidated interim storage as a faster means of removing spent fuel from sites such as the decommissioned Rancho Seco plant in her district.
Two corporate teams have applied for NRC licenses for consolidated interim storage facilities in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Both hope to begin operations in the early 2020s. Matsui’s bill, among other measures, would authorize the Energy Department to take title to commercial used fuel for transport to storage and allow the storage sites to be developed by DOE or a commercial operation.
That would address one of the potential obstacles to interim storage – the Nuclear Waste Policy Act prohibits the department from taking title to spent nuclear fuel until the permament repository is ready.
Matsui said she voted in favor of the prior Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act during the last Congress in the Republican-controlled House. But trying the same approach after Democrats took the majority in the November 2018 midterms “is not a realistic path forward,” she said.
The House had looked more favorably on Yucca Mountain under GOP leadership – twice supporting the Trump administration’s requests for funding to resume licensing at DOE and the NRC, even as the Senate zeroed out such appropriations and ultimately won the day in spending negotiations. This year, though, the Democrat-led House joined the Senate in dismissing the White House proposal for roughly $150 million to fund Yucca licensing.
The House in June passed spending legislation covering the two agencies. The Senate Appropriations Committee passed its version of the bill earlier this month, but it has not gotten a floor vote. Both chambers have passed a continuing resolution to keep the government operating at current funding levels through Nov. 21 while they work out final spending for the 2020 federal budget year.
Shimkus agreed that interim storage should be part of the solution, but said waste disposal cannot end there. “It takes money out of the Nuclear Waste Fund” intended to pay for the disposal facility, he said. “It will starve the financial process of getting to a long-term repository.”
