The House Rules Committee late Tuesday afternoon approved the rules of debate for a policy bill that would make it easier to send radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain in Nevada for permanent disposal.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2018 is now slated for a floor vote Thursday. Lawmakers proposed 17 amendments to the measure, which was spearheaded by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill) and cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee last year on a strong bipartisan vote.
The rule just approved allows lawmakers on the floor Thursday to consider only the 17 amendments brought before the Rules Committee during its markup Tuesday. Also under the rule, Republicans and Democrats would each get an hour to debate the amendments and the underlying bill, H.R. 3053. Finally, the rule waives all points of order against the legislation. Without such a waiver, any House member can derail floor debate and effectively kill a bill that violates the standing rules of the House of Representatives.
On Tuesday, members of Nevada’s House delegation on Tuesday blasted Shimkus’ bill, which they have opposed since its introduction last year.
All the members of Nevada’s House delegation offered at least one amendment to the bill. The friendliest of these, which would still seek to steer nuclear waste away from the site Congress more than 30 years ago designated as the repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, came from Rep. Mark Amodei: the sole GOP member of the state’s U.S. representatives.
Amodei told the Rules Committee that any Yucca legislation “really ought to be talking about reprocessing research.” His amendment would require the Department of Energy to study reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. Reprocessing can allow the fuel to be reused in commercial reactors, but it also can create new nuclear waste.
On the other end of the spectrum, Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) offered an amendment Thursday that would wipe out Shimkus’ bill and instead require the Department of Energy to select a new waste-storage site using the consent-based siting approach championed by the Barack Obama administration. Consent-based siting essentially means sending waste only to a locality that has agreed to host it, which Nevada has not.
Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.), who is leaving Congress, took a subtler tack with an amendment that would cancel the bill’s directive to offset any new Yucca appropriations with money from the Nuclear Waste Fund: essentially, a tax nuclear power plants have paid in order to fund an eventual federal storage site such as Yucca.
Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who is running for U.S. Sen. Dean Heller’s (R-Nev.) seat this fall, submitted a somewhat gentler amendment that would prohibit sending waste to Yucca until the White House Office of Management and Budget studies alternative uses for the site, such as Department of Defense research.
The Donald Trump administration wants to restart the Department of Energy’s application to license Yucca Mountain with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a permanent waste repository. The Barack Obama administration effectively canceled the application the agency filed in 2008. Since Trump took office, the House has supported funding a Yucca restart, but the Senate has not.