The Energy Department would get no money to turn Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., into a permanent nuclear-waste disposal site under a roughly $30-billion agency budget the Senate Appropriations Committee approved Thursday.
The committee signaled its intention in draft legislation that leaked earlier in the week before appropriators released the language of their bill and a detailed spending report that confirmed the upper chamber still will not fund Yucca.
If the Senate’s bill becomes law — in spite of the Trump administration’s preference to move ahead with Yucca Mountain for storage of U.S. commercial and defense waste — it would direct DOE to release a request for proposals for interim waste storage sites no later than 120 days after the president signs the legislation.
Moreover, the Senate’s bill report would essentially resurrect the Obama administration’s consent-based siting policy for nuclear waste. Report language specifies that a consolidated interim storage site could only be built with the approval of the state, local, and tribal governments in whose jurisdiction the facility would be built.
Some in industry privately described the consent-based siting provision as a Yucca poison pill; Nevada, which has no nuclear power plants of its own, has never consented to hosting a nuclear-waste disposal site. However, Congress has authorized Yucca, and so far only Yucca, as a permanent waste repository.
A spokesperson for the pro-Yucca Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington declined to comment Thursday on the Senate’s proposal.
At subcommittee and committee markups this week, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, said the interim storage pilot programs are a complement to, not a replacement for, Yucca Mountain.
Under the bill released Thursday after the Senate Appropriations Committee’s morning markup, the secretary of energy would be “authorized, in the current fiscal year [2018] and subsequent fiscal years, to conduct a pilot program, through 1 or more private sector partners, to license, construct, and operate 1 or more government or privately owned consolidated storage facilities to provide interim storage as needed for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, with priority for storage given to spent nuclear fuel located on sites without an operating nuclear reactor.”
The House appropriations proposal focused on Yucca, but another House bill — sponsored by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) and approved June 28 in a bipartisan vote of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — would allow DOE to pursue a single interim storage facility in parallel with the Yucca licensing process the administration and the lower chamber favor.
The Donald Trump administration requested $120 million in fiscal 2018 for DOE to resume its application to license Yucca Mountain as a permanent disposal site for spent nuclear fuel from U.S. power plants and other high-level radioactive waste. As part of that ask, the administration requested $10 million to start looking at options for interim storage sites: facilities where spent nuclear fuel now stored at power plants could be consolidated and later forwarded on to Yucca for permanent disposal.
The Barack Obama administration in 2010 essentially killed the Nevada project in what was widely seen as a concession to the powerful — and uncompromisingly anti-Yucca — Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.): the now-retired Democratic leader.
Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Yucca’s chief opponent in Washington now that Reid is retired, praised the committee’s bill Wednesday.
“This is a positive first step in a long fight to ensure that Yucca Mountain remains dead,” Heller said in a press release posted to his website. “I will continue to stand with the State of Nevada every step of the way and reiterate to this administration and to my colleagues in Congress: Nevada will not serve as the nation’s nuclear waste dump.”
Last week, the House Appropriations Committee essentially granted the Trump administration’s request for Yucca funding as part of a $30-billion DOE budget bill slated for a floor vote in that chamber next week.
The Senate committee’s bill would also not give the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the $30 million the Trump administration asked for the agency to resume consideration of the Yucca Mountain license application the White House wants DOE to pursue. Neither the committee’s bill nor the detailed spending report that accompanied it even mention Yucca in the sections devoted to NRC.
The Senate has not yet scheduled a floor vote for DOE’s 2018 budget bill. The House plans to package its version of the energy budget into a so-called mini-bus with several other spending bills and vote on the bundle next week, a House aide said.
Fiscal 2018 begins Oct. 1.
