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 mandatory 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 Mountain 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,” the DOE chief 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 initial three years of the president’s first term in office fighting to reverse the Barack Obama administration’s 2010 defunding of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission review of the DOE license application. 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.
Cortez Masto’s office did not respond to questions about a potential legislative attempt to undo the Yucca Mountain requirement. Until such an occurrence, the federal repository remains the law of the land.
“However, it is also the law of the land that we cannot spend money that has not been appropriated, and there have been zero funds appropriated for Yucca Mountain,” Brouillette told the committee. “That stalemate is largely the result of the voices here in Congress, the voices of the people of Nevada, and we have reached a point where the president has decided that we will not pursue this over the objections of the people of Nevada.”
Cortez Masto then asked whether the Energy Department would resume work on Yucca Mountain if it received appropriations from Congress.
“We will follow the law, obviously,” Brouillette said, “but it’s our intent to look for alternatives to Yucca Mountain.”
Brouillette in December moved up from DOE deputy secretary to the top spot at the agency.
For 2021, the agency has requested $27.5 million under the Office for Nuclear Energy for early stage research and development on temporary facilities that could consolidate used nuclear fuel until a final repository is ready. The tranche would also pay to continue to safeguard the Yucca Mountain property.
There is roughly 100,000 metric tons of federal and commercial nuclear waste still in storage across dozens of locations in about 40 states. Over four-fifths of that is spent fuel kept at the power plants where it was generated.
Cortez Masto thanked the Energy Department for finally listening to the voices of Nevadans, who for decades largely have opposed making their state home to nuclear waste generated in other states. Nevada’s state leaders and congressional delegation have not been persuaded by federal findings that the material could be stored underground without danger to humans or the environment.
Other lawmakers have not been pleased with the Trump administration decision, particularly those whose states are home to the radioactive waste that is supposed to go to Yucca Mountain.
“I strongly believe that Yucca Mountain can and should be part of the solution, and the commission’s own scientists have told us that it can safely store waste there for a million years,” Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told Brouillette during the panel’s hearing Wednesday on the DOE budget.
Alexander, though, also noted his longtime support for interim storage to expedite relocation of used fuel, and that the amount of waste waiting for disposal already exceeds the 70,000-metric-ton statutory capacity at Yucca Mountain. He is not seeking re-election this year.
Lawmakers in both hearings cited the value of the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2019 in driving a solution for the nuclear waste impasse. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) filed the bill, with co-sponsors Alexander and Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).
The Trump administration’s policy change emphasizes the importance of “Chairman Murkowski’s Nuclear Waste Administration Act, which would provide an innovative, bottom-up approach to setting and constructing a nuclear waste repository,” Energy and Natural Resources Ranking Member Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said during the Tuesday heairng.
Among the long list of measures in the bill: creating a separate agency to assume responsibility for the federal nuclear waste program; building one pilot facility to store spent fuel from decommissioned nuclear power plants, with additional facilities to be built for lower-priority used fuel and DOE defense waste; and setting a decade deadline under which siting of storage sites must halt unless at least one location is being assessed for a permanent repository.
Manchin said he and Cortez Masto had offered language for the legislation that would ensure it provides an “equitable path forward” on site selection. While he did not discuss specifics, Cortez Masto has sought to ensure the bill would give Nevada clear power of consent for any potential nuclear waste site within its borders.
“We expect these efforts to amend S. 1234, to extend consent to Nevada, to resume over the next few months,” Robert Halstead, executive director of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, said by email this week.
The Murkowski bill, filed in April 2019, remains before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
