The House Rules Committee was to write a rule for debate Monday that would tee up a vote this week on a massive spending bill that includes the Department of Energy’s proposed 2022 budget of roughly $45 billion.
The committee was scheduled to meet on Capitol Hill at 2:00 p.m. to consider a rule and amendments for a seven-bill appropriations bundle, which would raise the 2022 budget for DOE nuclear weapons cleanup about 7.5% year-over-year to $7.8 billion and hold the agency’s nuclear weapons and nonproliferation budget about flat at $20 billion or so.
Among other things, the House-authored cleanup budget for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would continue payments in lieu of taxes for municipalities near the Hanford Site in Washington and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The Joe Biden administration had proposed ending those payments.
Meanwhile, some Republican members of the House have proposed amendments that would increase funding for a pair of nuclear warhead programs at DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration: the W93 submarine launched warhead and the sea-launched variant of the W80-4 cruise missile warhead.
In civilian nuclear matters, the bill up for debate in the Rules Committee would provide some $20 million for DOE to begin work on a federally owned interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel from power plants. The bill, as expected, included no funding to develop a permanent waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev. Yucca is the only site Congress has authorized as a permanent disposal facility.
