The House on Wednesday easily passed a bipartisan nuclear-policy bill that serves as the lower chamber’s response to a similar bill the full Senate approved late last year.
The Atomic Energy Advancement Act sailed through 365-36, with 29 representatives not voting and one representative voting “present.” That handily eclipsed the two-thirds majority the bill needed to pass under suspension of the House rules: a method for expediting votes.
All of the “no” votes were from Democrats, many of them from the party’s left wing, according to an official vote sheet. Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), whose district borders the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, was among those who did not vote.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, voted “present.”
The bill, which now heads to the senate, would, among other things:
- Extend Price-Anderson liability caps for nuclear reactor operators for 40 years to Dec. 31, 2065
- Change the law to require that the NRC’s licensing of nuclear power plants “does not unnecessarily limit” either “the potential of nuclear energy to improve the general welfare” or “the benefits of nuclear energy technology to society.”
- Allow the NRC commissioner to appoint qualified people to temporary jobs with four-year terms and to broadly address insufficient employee compensation at the civilian nuclear regulator.
- Require the Department of Energy, within one year of the bill’s passage, to study the global civilian nuclear industry and tell Congress how U.S. allies are deploying or planning to deploy nuclear energy.
The House and Senate now must to reconcile their differences over two similar but distinct nuclear policy proposals: the Atomic Energy Advancement Act that just passed and the Senate’s ADVANCE Act, a bill spearheaded by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WVa.) and which the full Senate approved as an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
The House stripped the ADVANCE Act’s text out of the defense bill, which became law on Dec. 22.
Meanwhile, the House had not as of Thursday scheduled a vote on a companion bill to the Atomic Energy Advance Act, the Nuclear Fuel Security Act of 2023. That bill, also approved by the Energy and Commerce Committee in December, would boost U.S. production of low-enriched uranium and high assay low-enriched uranium, an energy-dense nuclear fuel needed by some experimental reactors the Department of Energy wants to help commercialize.
The Nuclear Fuel Security Act is separate from a stalled foreign aid bill that includes more than $2 billion to jumpstart a new domestic uranium refining industry.
