Officials from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce are headed to Washington, D.C., next week to visit with Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.): architect of a bill that would help clear the way for the federal government to turn Yucca Mountain in Nevada into a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste.
The Las Vegas Chamber — like most Nevada organizations up to and including the state government — vehemently opposes Yucca Mountain, or any other sort of nuclear-waste storage in the state. The chamber’s annual lobbying trip was reported by the editorial board of the local Las Vegas Sun, which also opposes Yucca.
In a Tuesday editorial, the newspaper called the Donald Trump administration’s drive to revive the Energy Department’s license application to construct and operate Yucca a plan “to turn our backyard into the nation’s dumping ground for high-level radioactive material.”
The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the upcoming trip.
The chamber will bring a delegation of more than 100 people, the Sun said.
Shimkus’ bill, the roughly 50-page Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, tackles a number of legislative shortcomings that, Yucca proponents say, stand in the way of building the repository. Among other things, the bill would modify the decades-old Nuclear Waste Policy Act to broadly increase the federal government’s powers at Yucca, including its ability to use groundwater at the site and regulate air quality there.
The legislation passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee with bipartisan support and now awaits a vote on the House floor. A House source said lawmakers are working to bring the measure for a vote before Congress’ annual winter-holiday recess.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has postponed a hearing on the nomination of Jeff Baran to remain on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The hearing had been scheduled for Sept. 20.
A new date for the hearing, in which lawmakers will also consider nominees for four assistant administrator positions at the Environmental Protection Agency, has not yet been rescheduled, a committee staffer said Thursday.
Baran, a lawyer and former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, is serving his first term on the commission. His term ends on June 30, 2018. However, at the urging of EPW Committee Ranking Member Tom Carper (D-Del.), his reappointment is being advanced in near-lockstep with two nominees who would fill vacant NRC spots: Annie Caputo, a nuclear engineer and Republican staffer on the EPW Committee, and David Wright, an energy consultant and former head of the South Carolina Public Service Commission and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
The Senate panel in July forwarded Caputo and Wright to the full chamber for a final vote, which has not yet been scheduled but is expected this fall. If approved by the Senate, Caputo would serve out the rest of a five-year term to June 30, 2021, while Wright’s term would end on the same date of 2020.
The other current members on the five-person commission are Chairman Kristine Svinicki, recently appointed to a third term to June 30, 2022; and Commissioner Stephen Burns, in his first term to June 30, 2019.
