In a vote more than a decade in the making, the House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would smooth the way for the Department of Energy to build a permanent nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2018 (H.R. 3053), shepherded through the House by Yucca crusader Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), cleared the lower chamber in a 340- 72 vote, with 119 Democrats and all but five Republicans supporting the measure. Sixteen lawmakers, an even mix of Democrats and Republicans, sat out the vote.
By a margin almost as large, 332-80, House members shot down a proposed amendment from Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) that would have replaced Shimkus’ bill with a so-called consent-based siting program: essentially, abandoning Yucca and seeking a volunteer state to host another repository for defense and commercial radioactive waste, including more than 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored at nuclear power sites across the nation.
In a scorching statement that began with a campaign rally cry, Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) immediately vowed to kill the bill once it reached the Senate.
“[W]ithout my leadership in the United States Senate, Yucca Mountain will get the green light,” Heller said in a press release. “[N]o one else can stop this; the House of Representatives has repeatedly attempted to bring nuclear waste to Nevada, but each time they’ve hit a brick wall only because I’ve stonewalled their action.”
The lawmaker pledged to put an immediate hold on the legislation, and to object to any motion to proceed at every opportunity.
Heller is up for re-election this year in a state that Democrat Hillary Clinton carried by about two-and-a-half points in her 2016 campaign for president. His likely opponent: Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who on Thursday voted against Shimkus’ bill, along with the rest of the Silver State’s House delegation.
Rosen wanted to amend Shimkus’ bill to prohibit DOE from sending waste to Yucca until the White House Office of Management and Budget studied alternative uses for the site, such as Department of Defense research.
The Thursday vote happened nearly a year after the bill was forwarded in June 2017 by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a similarly strong 49-4 vote. In a joint statement, Shimkus and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) called on the Senate “to quickly take up and pass this legislation to address this national priority.”
That appears unlikely. Heller is adamant that Yucca Mountain — which Congress designated in 1987 as the sole permanent disposal site for U.S. defense and commercial nuclear waste — never be developed by anyone, for any reason. His fellow Nevada senator, Catherine Cortez Masto (D), also joined with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to call the bill “dead on arrival” in the upper chamber.
H.R. 3053 would, among other things, allow the federal government to more quickly shift the federal land in Nye County to DOE from its current owner, the Interior Department. The measure specifies that the 147,000-acre Yucca plot would be used nearly fully for nuclear-waste disposal. It would also reactivate DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which oversaw work on Yucca Mountain before being dissolved by the Obama administration nearly a decade ago as it stopped all licensing activities for the repository.
Last year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the Shimkus bill would cost the government a little under $2 billion over the decade ending in 2027.
In statements from the floor Thursday, a series of House members not from Nevada touted the benefits of the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act — starting with finally getting radioactive waste out of their states, and freeing the federal government from billions of dollars in liability to nuclear utilities that paid into the fund for building Yucca Mountain but in the meantime are stuck with their used fuel.
Walden said the Hanford Site in his neighboring state of Washington needs a repository such as Yucca Mountain to permanently take its radioactive waste. Hanford holds 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, the byproduct of decades of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The material will eventually be processed into a form safe for disposal, which is where Yucca Mountain would come in.
The workers and community at Hanford did the nuclear research to win the Cold War, but they “did not agree to serve as a perpetual storage site” for the waste, Walden said.
Shimkus’ measure alone is not enough to restart Yucca Mountain. The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) still need funding to resume what experts say will be a years-long, quasi-judicial process to license the mountain as a waste repository.
The White House asked for about $170 million in fiscal 2019 for the agencies resume the Yucca licensing process initiated by the George W. Bush administration in 2008 and defunded by the Obama administration in 2011. So far in the Trump administration, the House has been willing to fund a Yucca restart. This week, the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee recommended $100 million more than the White House requested for Yucca in 2019.
The Senate, where Republicans cling to a two-vote majority that necessitates Democratic cooperation to pass any bill, has not marked up its first draft of DOE’s 2019 budget. For the current budget year, the chamber did not provide a penny for Yucca, and no money made it into the omnibus budget signed into law in March.
If an appropriations package with Yucca Mountain funding reaches the Senate floor, Heller would either have to block a budget his Republican colleagues got through a committee, or vote for the measure and reverse his position that Nevada will never be, in his words, “the nation’s nuclear waste dump.”
To the great interest of one House Democrat, Shimkus’ bill would also allow DOE to contract with one interim storage facility, where nuclear waste now stored at power plants around the nation could be consolidated and later forwarded on to Yucca.
“In my view, the most important thing this bill does is set up a path forward on interim storage,” Rep. Paul Tonko (N.Y.), ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce environment subcommittee, said on the House floor Thursday.
However, Shimkus’ bill stipulates that DOE may not actually move any waste into an interim storage facility until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules one way or the other on DOE’s Yucca license — a ruling experts estimate would take two to five years to materialize, considering the hundreds of technical contentions the state of Nevada has already raised against the license application. The bill allows DOE could jump the gun a little, if the agency determines, and certifies to Congress in writing, that it believes an NRC decision on Yucca is imminent.
Interim storage is also at the forefront of one influential senator’s mind.
In an April budget hearing, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, said Yucca Mountain “can and should be part of the solution to the nuclear waste stalemate,” but that “the quickest, and probably the least expensive, way for the federal government to start to meet its used nuclear fuel obligations is for the Department of Energy to contract with a private storage facility for used nuclear fuel.”
There, Alexander referred to privately operated interim storage sites that do not exist currently, but might in the near future. Holtec International is planning such a site, as is a team comprised of Orano and Waste Control Specialists.
But Alexander has also talked about completely retooling the federal government’s approach to spent nuclear fuel by creating a new federal agency devoted to nuclear waste. Along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Alexander introduced a bill to do just that in 2015. It went nowhere. In the same April budget hearing where he spoke supportively of Yucca, Alexander said he wanted to refile his old waste-agency bill.