The Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee recommended funding a pilot nuclear waste storage facility—proposed by the Obama Administration in January—in the Fiscal Year 2014 energy and water appropriations bill it approved yesterday. “The bill also reintroduces a provision that authorizes DOE to begin a consent-based process for developing one or more consolidated interim waste storage facilities,” Subcommittee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said during the markup. Feinstein also suggested that the bipartisan group of Senators who have been meeting to craft nuclear waste legislation are very close to releasing a final version. “We’ve had several meetings together and I believe we’re very close to, if not at, a point of agreement on a nuclear waste policy which this country has been sadly lacking,” Feinstein said. That bill “will advance comprehensive language to address spent fuel issues and implement the recommendations of the [Blue Ribbon Commission].” But, as the appropriations request illustrates, Feinstein said that while final legislation is developed, “I feel it is imperative to being to address the issue of spent nuclear fuel.”
However, the report accompanying the House version of the spending bill, released yesterday ahead of today’s full committee meeting, includes zero funding for the administration’s nuclear waste strategy, and instead would pump $25 million into restarting the Yucca Mountain geologic repository project, shuttered in 2010. In the report, House appropriatiors wrote that many activities associated with the Obama Administration’s January proposed nuclear waste management strategy, which would have searched for one or more alternative repositories through a consent-based siting process, “would only be necessary as a consequence of the Administration’s Yucca Mountain policy. … Since Congress has not made any changes to the authorized plan of record, which continues to be Yucca Mountain, no funding is provided for the requested activities.”
