A House bill that would make it easier for the federal government to build a permanent nuclear-waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain took a big step toward a floor vote this week, though none was scheduled as of Friday.
On Thursday, House leadership at last placed H.R. 3053, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, on the chamber’s Union Calendar. That makes the bill eligible for — though not certain to get — a vote on the floor.
At deadline Friday, there was still “no scheduling decision on the bill at this time,” a spokesperson for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wrote in an email.
Nevertheless, the bill was gathering momentum for a trip to the House Rules Committee, which will set the rules for floor debate. On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee filed its report on the bill: an explanation of what’s in the legislation, targeted at lawmakers who must vote on the measure but have not read it. The same day, two House committees with jurisdiction over the bill discharged the measure without hearings, essentially ensuring the next debate on Yucca policy will take place before the full House.
That appeared to dash the hopes of Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who in October appealed to the top Republican and Democrat members of the House Armed Services Committee not to waive their jurisdiction over H.R. 3053 and examine whether building Yucca would create logistical headaches for nearby Nellis Air Force Base.
Despite its forward progress this week, Shimkus’ bill still has a hurdle to cross. The measure runs afoul of a House rule that requires bills proposing new federal spending to identify a corresponding spending cut. That means the legislation will need a waiver from the House Rules Committee to be shielded during floor debate from hostile lawmakers. Without such a waiver, any representative could have the bill struck down on the floor by raising a point of order against it — and three of Nevada’s four representatives adamantly oppose building Yucca Mountain.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 is the product of almost a decade of deliberation by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), who since the early days of the Barack Obama administration has tried to gather legislative momentum to complete the Department of Energy’s 2008 application to license Yucca as a permanent disposal facility for U.S. defense and commercial nuclear waste.
The Obama administration effectively canceled the application in 2010 by declining to fund either the part of DOE that wrote the application, or the part of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) charged with reviewing the application.
Broadly, Shimkus’ bill would speed the transfer of responsibility for the federally owned Yucca site to the Energy Department from the Interior Department, and clarify that the 147,000-acre site will be used, with a few exceptions, only for nuclear waste disposal.
Shimkus debuted what became H.R. 3053 in draft form nearly six months ago. The measure was officially introduced in the House in June and emerged from the House Energy and Commerce Committee later that month with strong bipartisan support. It has attracted more than 100 co-sponsors, nearly 20 percent of whom are Democrats. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that Shimkus’ bill would result in some $1.8 billion in new government costs for the 10 years ending in 2027.
That includes a little less than $300 million in payments to states and local governments affected by Yucca, and a little more than $1.5 billion in lost government revenue, since the bill would bar fees on nuclear power until the NRC authorizes DOE to build Yucca.
Besides paving the way to license and build Yucca, Shimkus’ bill would also allow DOE to start work on one interim storage facility, where nuclear waste now stored at power plants across the country could be consolidated and later forwarded on to Yucca.
There is a catch, however: if Shimkus’ bill became law, DOE would not be permitted to move any waste into an interim storage facility until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules one way or the other on DOE’s Yucca license — a ruling experts estimate would take two to five years to materialize, considering the hundreds of technical contentions the state of Nevada has already raised against the license application.
Despite the bipartisan support for Shimkus’ bill, the proposal would not on its own get Yucca Mountain back on track. That power rests with congressional appropriators, who are starkly divided on the issue.
The House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee agreed to give the White House the $150 million in funding it requested for DOE and the NRC licensing work for the project in fiscal 2018, even though the panel did not sign off on some of the DOE organizational changes Trump sought in connection with the Yucca revival. The full House later approved the language as part of a larger appropriations package now awaiting consideration in the Senate.
The Senate has shown no interested in funding Yucca and instead prefers starting work on a privately operated interim storage site. The Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, led by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), produced a 2018 DOE budget that was passed by the full committee in August and included no funding for Yucca Mountain.
So, for now, the Yucca stalemate continues. Lawmakers this summer could not reconcile their differences over proposed spending in fiscal 2018, and in September passed a stopgap budget bill that mostly freezes federal spending at 2017 levels through Dec. 8.
In 2017, DOE had no budget for either interim storage sites or Yucca Mountain.
