Nuclear policy reforms that hitched a ride on an annual must-past defense bill are in trouble in the House, the bill’s sponsor said Monday at a meeting of nuclear professionals.
“[W]e’ve really hit a stumbling block if not just a whole wall in the House,” Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.) said in a morning speech to attendees of the American Nuclear Society’s (ANS) annual winter meeting in Washington. “So anything that you can do to help us with the wall in the House at the Energy and Commerce Committee, we need your help.”
Capito’s Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act of 2023 was attached to the Senate’s version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in July. The bill is considered a must-pass piece of legislation, but the House has no obligation to allow Capito’s reforms into the final NDAA.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over nuclear energy and waste policy in Congress’ lower chamber, and though its members have not said so publicly, they may object to allowing any nuclear energy proposal to pass the House before they get their say-so about what goes in it.
“I don’t think it’s a policy issue that the committee has with it or that the House has with I think it’s more of a process issue,” Capito said during the ANS meeting. “Have they fully vetted everything, is this everything they want in it?”
Capito’s proposed reforms passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this summer, 16-3. Broadly, they aim to make it easier for U.S. companies to export nuclear power technology, including the new reactor designs broadly referred to as advanced reactors.
The bill would also:
- Extend the $13-billion liability cap known as the Price-Anderson Act by 20 years to 2045.
- Require annual reports, by 2025, from the Department of Energy on the U.S. nuclear-waste inventory and the associated federal financial liability.
- Mandate that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assess every three years whether the agency uses “the most efficient metrics and schedules” to issue licenses.
In late October, the House Energy and Commerce energy, climate and grid security subcommittee marked up several bills that would do some of the same things that Capito’s proposal would do, though those measures still awaited a vote from the full committee as of Monday.
Beyond that, the House floor remained gridlocked amid infighting in the Republican majority about federal spending levels and the refusal of minority Democrats to involve themselves with those negotiations.
Meanwhile, Capito told ANS attendees on Monday that her bill is “there, it’s ready to go, it’s been fully vetted, maybe it doesn’t have everything or maybe it has one or two things that maybe doesn’t agree with the House, but it’s teed up for victory here, it’s teed up for a presidential signature.”
