Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. We’ll check in with one long, big-picture update every 25 days, with a regular flow of updates in between to keep you up to date on news affecting Department of Energy nuclear cleanup during the new administration’s crucial first days.
While the young Trump administration, in the absence of a confirmed secretary of energy, has not signaled its approach to the quandary of nuclear waste management, Congress has jumped into the fray.
The Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Committee, which holds jurisdiction over national nuclear waste management, has fielded three pieces of nuclear legislation in the early days of the 115th Congress. One of the bills seeks Energy Department authorization to contract with private companies for interim nuclear waste storage, while another would require local consent for DOE to move forward with plans for a nuclear waste repository. Republicans consider both bills nonstarters.
The third piece of legislation would prohibit DOE from planning, developing, or constructing a repository solely for defense nuclear waste until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made a final decision on authorizing construction of the Yucca Mountain storage site in Nevada. The committee has suggested a willingness to consider that bill.
Any significant action from the executive branch, meanwhile, will likely wait until after former Texas governor Rick Perry’s anticipated confirmation as energy secretary. There has no been no sign of significant opposition to Perry, but no vote yet, either.
President Barack Obama in December 2008 nominated Steven Chu for energy secretary, and he was confirmed on Jan. 20, 2009. In March of that year, Chu said during a Senate hearing that that department no longer considered Yucca Mountain a workable option, and DOE withdrew its license application for the site in 2010.
It wasn’t until January 2016 that DOE kicked off a yearlong effort to gather feedback for its consent-based siting process, a multi-part plan involving interim and eventually permanent waste disposal in which defense and commercial waste would be stored at separate sites — and only with support from the impacted communities. The department issued a draft of the process for public comment just before Trump took office. Many Republicans feel that the previous administration put more effort into stopping Yucca Mountain than it did in developing an alternative.
The future of consent-based siting is unclear, although lawmakers including Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) are pushing for interim solutions. Issa introduced the bill that would allow DOE to contract with private companies such as Waste Control Specialists and Holtec International, which are pursuing NRC licenses for interim spent fuel storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico, respectively.
Issa’s district is home to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which has stored 3.6 million pounds of nuclear material on the Pacific coast, along a fault line. About 100 nuclear sites around the country are also stuck with spent fuel, stemming from DOE’s failure to take title to the nuclear waste and deliver it to Yucca Mountain.
Yucca Mountain has long been contested by officials and the public in Nevada, with now-retired Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) leading the charge. Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) says she’s poised to take up the mantle against Yucca Mountain as the most senior member of the Nevada House delegation. She introduced one of the apparent DOA bills, the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, which would require DOE to obtain consent from affected state and local governments before making an expenditure from the Nuclear Waste Fund for a nuclear waste repository. A committee aide recently characterized it as an anti-Yucca Mountain bill, saying that nuclear waste would never move from reactor sites if the bill were enacted.
The Trump administration has signaled the possibility of resuming the Yucca Mountain licensing process with the NRC. It remains to be seen, though, how serious that intent is.
It appears it could be another week or more before Perry’s confirmation. Though Yucca Mountain might not be a major priority for the new president, it will certainly be high on Perry’s list of objectives if he is confirmed. Yucca Mountain is considered third on the list of major priorities for DOE, behind maintaining the country’s nuclear arsenal and cleanup and closure of nuclear waste sites.
The NRC is now headed by a Republican, Yucca Mountain friendly chairwoman, Kristine Svinicki, who Trump chose last month to replace Chairman Stephen Burns, an Obama administration appointee who opposes licensing action on the repository and who remains on the board.
Svinicki disagreed with discontinuing Yucca Mountain licensing proceedings in 2011, during a contentious NRC vote where the four-member commission was split on whether to allow DOE to withdraw its application.
The NRC’s license application review lasted until 2011, when the agency closed out the program. In 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered the regulator to resume the license review using previously appropriated funds. The agency has spent about $15 million of Nuclear Waste Fund money on Yucca licensing activities since 2013, and the state of Nevada estimates DOE will need $1.7 billion and the NRC $330 million for the licensing work that remains.
Furthering their case for a Yucca Mountain restart, Republicans have pointed to a highly critical congressional audit, released late last month, that could be used to make the case for DOE reversing course on the Obama administration’s directive to build a deep-underground defense waste disposal site.
In a draft plan released Dec. 16, then-President Obama’s DOE estimated it would cost about $3 billion over 11 years to locate a suitable site for a site that would accept only nuclear waste from defense programs. The Government Accountability Office, in its own report, said the agency’s price tag for selecting a site might be off by tens of billions of dollars — noting that the DOE plan would incur separate expenses for site selection, site characterization, and other operations for two facilities rather than one. Site characterization for Yucca alone cost $8.5 billion, according to the report.
Republicans say the report validates their concerns about the defense waste repository.
