Congress again provided no direct funding for nuclear waste storage or disposal in a massive fiscal 2020 appropriations bill that was waiting on President Donald Trump’s signature Friday afternoon.
While the House and Senate had left little doubt they would reject the administration’s latest request for money for the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, they had previously telegraphed support for advancing a program of centralized, temporary storage of radioactive waste.
But no corresponding money or language made it into H.R. 1865, the domestic priorities and international assistance appropriations minibus, which features a $48.3 billion energy and water section that funds the Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and other agencies.
The bill was unveiled Monday, alongside a separate national security appropriations minibus. Together they encompass all 12 congressional spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The House passed both measures on Tuesday, followed by the Senate on Thursday.
Appropriators in each chamber did not offer direct explanations for the excision of the nuclear-waste management components from the earlier House and Senate energy and water bills.
“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.
Multiple sources placed Assistant House Speaker Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), who is running to succeed Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and who opposes plans for a spent-fuel storage facility in his state, at the center of the debate. Lujan was not among the bicameral group of negotiators that prepared the final bill, but spokeswoman Lauren French acknowledged Thursday that “he used his voice to advocate for his position.”
Whatever the cause, the result extends for at least another year the decades-long impasse on final disposal of the nation’s nuclear waste.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act made the Energy Department legally responsible for disposal of high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations and spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. The agency is more than two decades past its Jan. 31, 1998, deadline to begin disposal of what is now a stockpile of roughly 100,000 tons of waste.
The federal property at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was designated as the disposal site in a 1987 amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The George W. Bush administration Energy Department in 2008 submitted a license application for the repository to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding within two years.
An Obama-era program for consent-based siting of storage and disposal facilities never got far, and the Trump administration has refocused on Yucca Mountain since taking office in January 2017. The Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission requested funding for fiscal 2018 and 2019 to resume licensing. Republicans had the majority in both chambers of Congress at the time, but the House supported Yucca Mountain and the Senate preferred consolidated interim storage – their compromise in those years was to fund neither.
The administration’s budget plan for 2020, issued last March, featured a request of roughly $150 million at DOE and the NRC for Yucca licensing.
By then, Democrats had taken control of the House in the November 2018 midterms. They zeroed out the Yucca request in favor of $47.5 million for integrated management of nuclear waste, including $25 million to begin the process of moving spent nuclear power plant fuel into centralized storage. The House in June approved that approach within a multi-agency minibus, after turning back late attempts from Republican lawmakers to insert money for Yucca Mountain into the bill.
Senate appropriators, meanwhile, remained consistent in their support for consolidated interim storage as the best means for expediting removal of used fuel from nuclear power plants. The Senate Appropriations Committee in September approved its energy and water bill, which would have established a pilot program to license, build, and operate at least one temporary storage site. The full Senate never voted on the bill.
The compromise energy and water appropriations component of the H.R. 1865 minibus makes no reference to Yucca Mountain or interim storage.
However, an explanatory statement for the legislation designates $62.5 million to be used for DOE used fuel disposition research and development. It gives the Energy Department 90 days within enactment of the bill to issue a report “on innovative options for disposition of high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel management.
“Priority should be given to technological options that are cost-effective, are able to be implemented in the short term, and consider siting stakeholder engagement,” according to the statement. “The Department is encouraged to use research and development funding for innovative technological options.”
The Energy Department would also have 60 days to contract the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a wide-ranging evaluation of “waste aspects” of advanced nuclear power reactors. That report would be due within 20 months of enactment of the legislation, addressing topics including specific disposal or storage requirements for advance-reactor waste and the potential reprocessing of used nuclear fuel.
A spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged the absence of nuclear-waste management language in the final conference bill, but did not discuss the process that led to that result. Representatives for Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who have championed interim storage for years, also by deadline had not addressed the proceeding in detail.
Two corporate teams have applied for Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses to build and operate spent fuel storage facilities, starting in the early to mid-2020s. Energy technology firm Holtec International wants a facility with a maximum capacity exceeding 100,000 metric tons of material in Lea County, N.M. Interim Storage Partners, a joint venture of Orano and Waste Control Specialists, plans for 40,000 metric tons of capacity in Andrews County, N.M.
The administration of New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) has strongly opposed the Holtec project, warning of potential impacts to the state’s agriculture and energy industries.
Congressman Lujan, among others leaders in New Mexico, has expressed concerns that interim storage could become permanent if the federal government remains unable to build a final repository for the radioactive material.
“Our office always communicates with the appropriations teams,” French said by telephone Thursday. In a follow-up email Friday, she said: “As is common practice, our office sent letter to the appropriations committee voicing the priorities the congressman was seeking in the 2020 funding package.”
None of the communications addressed Lujan’s Senate campaign, which he announced in April, French added.
The lawmaker did vote in favor of H.R. 1865.
