HENDERSON, Nev. — There is little chance the appropriations bill covering the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission will provide any funding in fiscal 2019 for licensing the long-planned Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada, issue observers said Wednesday.
Politics are at the heart of the matter, specifically safeguarding Sen. Dean Heller’s (R-Nev.) chances for re-election in November aren’t harmed by any pro-Yucca legislation from Capitol Hill, according to Victoria Napier, senior vice president for government and public affairs at Atkins.
“I would be surprised if Yucca Mountain was included in there … only because we’re so close to the midterm election for Senator Dean Heller,” Napier said during a panel discussion at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit. “It would seem somewhat myopic for them to put that in a bill, announce that, several weeks before an election.”
Lawmakers on the House-Senate conference committee for the “minibus” that would fund several agencies met for about 45 minutes Wednesday, but largely spent the time discussing collegiality and declaring their priorities for the consensus version of their respective bills. As of Friday the 2019 Energy and Water, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act, along with the accompanying report detailing its spending measures, had not been released.
That bill is expected to be the first of several minibus budget measures to be sent to the White House for signature. Politico reported Friday the energy and water bill could be completed over the weekend ahead of votes in the House and Senate next week. Congress has until Sept. 30 to pass some form of appropriations bill to prevent a shutdown of the federal government. In recent years that has involved a series of short-term continuing resolutions after the new budget term begins on Oct. 1.
Congress since 1982 has been trying to find a solution for permanent disposal of the nation’s spent fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors and high-level waste from defense nuclear operations. That radioactive material today stands at somewhere around 90,000 metric tons, largely kept on-site at the point of generation.
In a 1987 amendment to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Congress designated Yucca Mountain, in Nye County about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the site for the underground facility. The George W. Bush administration Department of Energy filed the license application with the NRC in 2008, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding just two years later. The Trump administration has sought funding in the last two budget cycles to restart licensing, but Congress has yet to appropriate the money.
For fiscal 2019, the administration asked for nearly $170 million for nuclear waste storage, primarily for Yucca Mountain licensing. About $10 million would be used to advance consolidated interim storage of spent fuel. The House tacked on another $100 million for Yucca Mountain, while the Senate zeroed out funding for the program.
At every opportunity, Heller has touted his efforts to ensure there is no money to import radioactive waste into Nevada, which remains deeply unpopular at the state level. The lawmaker, serving his first full term, is viewed as one of the most endangered Republican lawmakers in his campaign against Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.). Common wisdom has been that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is putting his foot on any legislation that promotes the waste facility to defend Heller and the slim 51-49 GOP majority in the Senate.
“Many thought that once Senator Harry Reid was gone, Yucca would scream towards fruition,” Napier said of the retired Nevada senator and die-hard Yucca opponent. “But Senator Reid has been gone for two years and no progress has been made on Yucca Mountain. And why? Because of an ever-changing dynamic in the political landscape.”
Speaking on the same panel, Assistant Energy Secretary for Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs Melissa Burnison demurred on discussing the specific outlook for Yucca funding in fiscal 2019 and 2020.
However, participants at this week’s conference said there could be opportunities for Yucca-advancing legislation in the lame-duck session of Congress between the Nov. 6 midterm and the beginning of the 116th Congress on Jan. 3, 2019. By that time control of Congress for the next two years will be settled.
While concurring on the small chance for Yucca funding in the minibus, Katrina McMurrian, executive director of the nongovernmental Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, said during a separate panel discussion the program could find a place in continuing resolutions passed after the election in the absence of a full-year funding measure.
Those few weeks also could open the door for a high-profile Yucca Mountain bill that advanced out of the House earlier this year and is awaiting action in the Senate, speakers said.
Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act contains a set of measures that would strengthen the federal government’s capability to build the disposal facility. They include allowing Washington to more quickly shift ownership of the federal land from the Interior Department to the Energy Department; specifying that the 147,000-acre property would be used almost completely for nuclear waste disposal; and reactivating DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which developed the license application before being dissolved during the Obama administration.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee in June 2017 voted 49-4 in favor of the bill, which the full chamber then passed last May in a 340-72 vote. The Senate directed the legislation to its Environment and Public Works Committee, where it remains.
Bills with that level of bipartisan support have a good chance of being picked up during the lame-duck session, Burnison said.
Napier said the Shimkus bill’s chances could still depend on the outcome of the election. “What I will say is I do think there is an opportunity next year,” she added, suggesting Shimkus could resubmit the legislation in the next Congress.
Eric Knox, vice president for strategic development in AECOM’s nuclear and environment business, noted that other controversial measures have passed during prior lame-duck sessions. “Who knows. You go back to 1982, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed in a lame duck.”
Future Challenges
Even if Congress kicks in money, the Yucca Mountain project faces a number of other challenges, according to one former DOE official.
If the Department of Energy revives the license application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that could initiate a three-year adjudication by an NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, said Ward Sproat, who led the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management from 2006 to 2009.
The state of Nevada has already filed more than 200 technical contentions with the NRC against the Yucca plan and has said it is ready with at least 30 more should the adjudication resume. The Department of Energy must be ready to aggressively defend the license application, Sproat said.
“Which means they’re going to need experts who were involved in putting that license application together available as witnesses and be able to defend the decisions we made when we put that together,” Sproat said from the stage at the RadWaste Summit. “Guess what, we’re getting older. Some have retired, some are still around, but our time frame to be able to pull those people in and defend that license application is getting shorter and shorter.”
Sproat himself left the department in 2009 and retired after nearly a decade at Bechtel. He did not offer a particular point in time at which DOE might find itself without the expertise needed to defend its license application.
There is also not enough money in the Nuclear Waste Fund to actually pay for Yucca Mountain and interim storage of radioactive waste, Sproat said. The fund was established under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to pay for permanent disposal of nuclear waste, and nuclear utilities paid into it until 2013.
The Energy Department said in June that the fund balance as of fiscal 2017 was just shy of $38 billion. “There is not enough money there at this stage in the game to build Yucca, operate it, and fund interim storage, and I’m not sure many people recognize that,” Sproat said, without discussing a specific cost figure.
Consolidated interim storage is a possible avenue for DOE to meet its legal mandate to remove spent nuclear fuel from power plants before a permanent repository is ready. The NRC is reviewing two license applications for interim storage programs: a facility in southeastern New Mexico that would be operated by Holtec International; and a site in West Texas managed by a joint venture of Waste Control Specialists and Orano. With regulatory approval, the companies say they could begin taking waste shipments by the early to mid-2020s.
