Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said this week she will block the Senate from quickly confirming nominees for senior Department of Energy jobs until the agency sets a date to remove a half-ton of plutonium from Nevada.
“Until I get commitment from [Secretary of Energy Rick Perry] that [DOE] will set a date for the removal of plutonium they secretly shipped to Nevada and stop any further shipment, I will be putting a hold on all nominees,” Cortez Masto wrote on Twitter. The Nevada Independent first reported the news.
Cortez Masto made her vow only days after the Senate Armed Services and Energy and Natural Resources committees again approved five DOE nominees, including William Bookless to be second-in-command at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Rita Baranwal as assistant energy secretary for nuclear energy.
Baranwal and the others were first nominated last year during the 115th Congress. They made it through committee, but did not get confirmation votes from the full Senate before the Congress ended on Jan. 3. The nominations were returned to the president, which resubmitted them in January.
The nominees then had to repeat the process, with the committees advancing their nominations without hearings last week. They were cruising to Senate votes, until Cortez Masto put her foot down over the shipment of half a metric ton of plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site’s (NNSS) Device Assembly Facility sometime before November 2018.
Nevada sued the NNSA in federal court on Nov. 30 to stop the plutonium shipment, unaware, the state said, that the agency had already moved the material to NNSS from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The NNSA was required to move the material out of South Carolina after failing to turn it into commercial reactor fuel, per a 2017 federal court order in a separate lawsuit. The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency said it informed Nevada leaders of the incoming plutonium.
A senior DOE official, speaking with reporters Monday on a conference call about the agency’s fiscal 2020 budget request, said “[i]t’s every Senator’s prerogative to exercise their judgement … on nominees.”
Cortez Masto’s office did not reply to a request for comment.
Cortez Masto cannot single-handedly prevent the Senate from voting on the nominees, but she can prevent the upper chamber from approving the nominations by unanimous consent. That process, also known as hotlining, can take much less time than organizing a roll-call vote, but only if no senator objects to a nominee.
By publicly signaling she would object to a future request for unanimous consent to approve DOE nominees on the floor, Cortez Masto has essentially short-circuited the hotline.
On Thursday, Bloomberg Environment reported that Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) planned to speak with Cortez Masto about the latter’s concerns in hopes of resolving the nominee hold
Baranwal currently leads DOE’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) program, which provides funding and other resources in support of research and development of nuclear energy technologies. If confirmed, she would assume leadership of the Office of Nuclear Energy, which seeks to advance nuclear power technologies and waste managment.
The office would almost certainly manage the DOE license application for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, assuming Congress appropriates money for that proceeding. It has twice rejected the Trump administration’s budget request for licensing, but the White House fiscal 2020 budget plan released this week would provide more than $150 million at DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the program.
