After Little Nuclear Debate, House’s 2020 Spending Bill Goes to Senate on Party Line

The House on Wednesday approved a 2020 spending bill that would provide more funding that sought to clean up shuttered nuclear weapons sites, and less funding that requested for active weapons programs.

The Democrat-led House approved the bill on an essentially party line vote of 226 to 203. The so-called minibus spending measure funds the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The DOE portion of the bill contains just over $7 billion for the Environmental Management office’s cleanup of Cold War nuclear sites, and just under $16 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs — respectively, about $700 million above and $600 million below what the White House requested for those DOE branches.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) would get about $885 million, under the bill: about $22.5 million less than. The bill has now money for DOE’s application to license Yucca Mountain with the NRC as a permanent civil-defense nuclear waste repository.

Now that the House has approved the minibus, the Senate Appropriations Committee is clear to write and debate its own 2020 spending proposals. However, appropriators in the upper chamber had not scheduled any markups at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.

When nuclear matters figured into floor debate at all, they centered on nuclear weapons programs — and then, mostly on Pentagon programs.

One change to the NNSA portion of the bill amendment squeaked through on a party-line vote as part of a package of amendments: a directive to provide $5 million more for the agency’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account to continue researching the use of low-enriched uranium as fuel for nuclear-powered warships and submarines. The amendment would leave the program with $25 million in funding for 2020.

On Tuesday, the House shot down one amendment that would have allowed the Navy to deploy the low-yield, submarine-launched W76-2 ballistic missile warhead, and another that would have prohibited the Pentagon from working on its proposed Long Range Standoff Weapon: the cruise missile planned to replace the 1980s-vintage Air Launched Cruise Missile in 2025.

During the two-day part of minibus floor debate that concerned the DOE portion of the bill, no lawmaker offered any amendments dealing with defense- or civilian nuclear waste.

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) — the House’s de facto dean of nuclear waste — tried to get an amendment to the floor that would have provided funding for DOE to resume its stalled license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to turn Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., into a permanent civil-defense waste repository.

The House Rules Committee, however, would not even let Shimkus debate the possibility on the floor.

Instead, the bill will go to the Senate with about $47.5 million for “integrated waste management,” including $25 million to help move spent reactor fuel now stored on-site at nuclear power plants around the nation into consolidated interim storage.