The full House on Thursday approved a Department of Energy budget that provides guns and gates for Yucca Mountain plus some money to begin siting a federally operated interim storage facility for nuclear waste — the same proposals with which the bill emerged from committee.
The House’s seven-bill appropriations package, which passed on a 219-208 party line vote, includes roughly $20 million in funding for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (ONE) to pursue a siting inquiry for a federal interim storage site to house the nation’s spent nuclear fuel, using the consent-based siting process recommended by the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
No members offered any amendments related to the proposed interim storage program. However, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) at a House Appropriations Committee markup July 16 offered and withdrew an amendment aimed at stopping commercially operated consolidated interim storage sites, which appear to be cruising toward a license even as Yucca molders.
Cuellar told RadWaste Monitor following the meeting that he would work with committee chair Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and ranking member Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) to work some language into the bill that addressed the issue. In the bill the full House voted out Thursday, language related to interim storage and the NRC appeared largely unchanged from earlier versions.
Now that the budget has gotten through the House on the eve of its August recess, the ball is in the Senate’s court. At deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor the Senate hadn’t published any draft appropriations. Without bicameral consensus, Congress could resort, as it does more often than not, to a stopgap spending bill that extends the current fiscal year’s budget at least part of the way into the next.
Overall, the House’s 2022 DOE budget would grant ONE a little less than it wanted for fiscal 2022, if the measure becomes law. The office would only get around $1.6 billion of the $1.8 billion it asked for. NRC, however, would be fully funded for fiscal 2022 with a net allocation of around $130 million, a figure that accounts for the projected $750 million the independent regulatory agency will recover in licensing fees.
In a statement of administration policy released this week the White House said that President Biden would sign the seven-bill minibus appropriations package that includes DOE’s 2022 spending bill.
