A House Appropriations panel on Wednesday approved a spending bill that would greatly increase the budget for the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons branch and fund a restart of the agency’s application to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a nuclear waste site.
The House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee approved the measure on a voice vote without amendments or drama, sending the bill on for a vote by the full committee that had not been scheduled at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
Congress will be out of session next week for the U.S. Independence Day holiday. The subcommittee’s bill report, which will contain a detailed breakdown of the roughly $30-billion DOE budget the panel proposed for fiscal 2018, will be released a day before the full committee markup, a House aide said Tuesday. The subcommittee’s total DOE budget proposal is about $2 billion higher than the Donald Trump administration requested for 2018.
The subcommittee’s energy and water appropriations bill would as the administration requested give DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) almost $14 billion in fiscal 2018: more than a 7.5-percent boost from 2017. The Office of Environmental Management (EM) would get about $6.4 billion for legacy nuclear cleanup: about even with the current appropriation and slightly less than the $6.5 billion the White House sought for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
Funding for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, would as the administration requested be cut to about $952 million under the House panel’s proposal: a 5-percent decrease from 2017 levels.
The subcommittee bill essentially meets the administration’s ask for Yucca Mountain funding, providing $120 million within DOE and $30 million for NRC for activities related to DOE’s application to license the site as a permanent repository for civilian and defense nuclear waste.
Experts estimate it will take between two and five years to complete a Yucca license application, once DOE restarts one. The Barack Obama administration in 2010 halted the license application the George W. Bush administration started with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
