WASHINGTON —Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette on Tuesday would not commit to supporting a congressional rewrite of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to exclude construction of a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
“If we were to consider a repeal of the 1987 amendment that designated Yucca Montain as the nation’s sole nuclear waste repository, would you oppose or support that?” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) asked Brouillette during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Energy Department’s budget request for fiscal 2021.
“I’d have to reserve judgment,” Brouillette responded.
It was one of several questions Cortez Masto asked Brouillette about the Donald Trump administration’s election-year decision not to seek funds for the budget period beginning Oct. 1 to license Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear waste repository.
It is an abrupt about-face after the administration spent the three years of the president’s first term in office fighting to reverse the Barack Obama administration’s defunding of the Yucca licensing proceeding. The effort proved futile — even when the GOP controlled both chambers, Congress rejected each funding request.
In the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Congress gave the Energy Department until Jan. 31, 1998, to begin disposal of used fuel from nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations – a deadline breached decades ago. The law was amended in 1987 to direct the waste be deposited under Yucca Mountain.
Essentially, Brouillette would confirm only that there would be no licensing drive in the upcoming fiscal year, assuming Congress passes that section of the Energy Department’s $35.4 billion budget. Federally funded guns, gates, and guards would remain to safeguard the federal property, Brouillette affirmed, but none of the $27.5 million DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy requested for early stage research and development of interim storage of nuclear waste will be used to help the agency push utility-owned spent nuclear fuel to either Yucca or even a consolidated interim storage site.
Brouillette is scheduled to be back on Capitol Hill today for another budget hearing, starting at 2:30 p.m. before the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee.
