Congress plans to provide no funding for nuclear waste storage or disposal in a massive fiscal 2020 appropriations bill rolled out Monday evening.
House and Senate appropriators released two packages encompassing 12 separate spending bills for the budget year that began on Oct. 1. H.R. 1865, the domestic and international assistance appropriations minibus, features a $48.3 billion energy and water section that funds the Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and other agencies.
The Energy Department and NRC together had requested about $150 million to resume the long-frozen licensing of the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository in Nevada. The House and Senate energy and water bills had zeroed out those requests, and Congress maintained that stance in its compromise appropriations.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the final bill provides nothing for interim storage of nuclear waste even after both chambers’ earlier bills had telegraphed support for that approach.
The Energy Department is legally responsible for disposal of high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations and spent fuel from nuclear power plants. The agency is more than two decades past its Jan. 31, 1998, deadline to begin disposal, and interim storage has been seen as an avenue for more quickly meeting its responsibility to take used fuel from its points of generation.
The original House energy and water bill, passed in June, would have provided $47.5 million for integrated management of radioactive waste, including $25 million for interim storage. The full Senate never passed its version of the legislation, which would have established a program for consent-based interim storage of nuclear waste.
Sources on Capitol Hill acknowledged the absence of nuclear waste management funding, but did not discuss details of what happened in House-Senate negotiations.
“I think it illustrates that interim is more complicated than some wish it were,” Jordan Haverly, spokesman for resolutely pro-Yucca Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), said by email.
The House is scheduled to take up the bills today. Congress has little time to approve both – the latest stopgap measure that have kept the government open to date in fiscal 2020 expires on Friday.
