By John Stang
The chair of a key U.S. Senate committee said Thursday she hopes to have a new secretary of energy confirmed in time to take office when Rick Perry steps down from the position on Dec. 1.
“My intention is to move you through the committee process as fast as possible,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette at the end of his nomination hearing before her panel.
Other committee members did not state opposition to Brouillette’s confirmation as they quizzed him for nearly two hours on a range of energy and energy-adjacent topics, including new nuclear power technologies and Perry’s contacts with Ukrainian officials.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) asked Brouillette whether he supports reviving the proposed permanent repository for nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, which has been in limbo since 2010. The Obama administration defunded licensing for the facility nearly a decade ago, and Nevada’s congressional delegation has been instrumental in keeping the project from getting new money under the Trump administration.
Brouillette said DOE is obligated to follow the laws made by Congress, including the 1987 amendment of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act that directed the agency to ship the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste nuclear waste to the federal property about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. That has been the position of Brouillette and Perry throughout their tenures leading the Energy Department.
For the past three years, the White House has requested appropriations for DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to resume licensing. Congress zeroed out the first two requests, primarily due to opposition in the Senate. Both chambers appear ready to blank the two agencies’ roughly $150 million request for fiscal 2020, instead providing money to advance centralized, temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel. Congress, though, has yet to complete its budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
It is ultimately up to Congress to decide the policy for disposal of the nation’s nuclear waste, Brouillette said: “Until Congress makes a decision on Yucca Mountain, the Department of Energy will do nothing.”
While questioning Brouillette, Cortez Masto also noted legislation she introduced in March to require consent from the impacted state, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes before the federal government can proceed with a nuclear waste repository. That bill is currently in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Asked if he supported her bill, Brouillette said he had not yet read that legislation. The nominee said he would do so and then provide an answer to Cortez Masto.
Cortez Masto, who met with Brouillette earlier in the week, also secured his commitment to remove half a metric ton of plutonium from the state by 2026. The material was shipped to DOE’s Nevada National Security Site last year from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, under order from a federal judge in a lawsuit filed by that state. Brouillette was upholding a commitment made by Perry earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Nevada is fighting in federal court to force the plutonium out earlier.
Last summer, Brouillette told Nevada’s governor that DOE had mistakenly shipped six groups of a total of 32 canisters of mislabeled low-level radioactive wastes from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to the Nevada National Security Site, north of Las Vegas. The mislabeled wastes were out of compliance with the site acceptance criteria. The first of these wastes are shipped in 2013.
The department has launched an internal investigation into the matter. Brouillette said Thursday the first draft of the final report is expected to be ready in 30 to 45 days.
“Nevadans have very little reason to trust DOE,” Cortez Masto said at the end of her questioning of Brouillette.
Perry, the former governor of Texas, has served as energy secretary since March 2017, in charge of an agency with a roughly $30 billion annual budget. Roughly two-thirds of that is directed to the NNSA’s nuclear-weapon and nuclear-nonproliferation operations and cleanup of contaminated nuclear sites by the Office of Environmental Management.
Perry announced his resignation on Oct. 17, saying he would return to Texas. Perry has been increasingly tied into the House’s Ukraine-focused impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump.
Brouillette was confirmed as deputy energy secretary in August 2017 by a 79-17 Senate vote. Cortez Masto voted against his confirmation, as did then-Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.). President Donald Trump nominated him as energy secretary on Nov. 7.
“I, for one, believe you’ve done a good job as second-in-command,” Murkowski said.
The Energy and Natural Resources Committee has scheduled a business meeting Tuesday to consider pending nominations. A committee staffer on Friday could not say whether that included Brouillette.
Before becoming deputy secretary, Brouillette spent more than a decade leading Washington operations for the United Services Automobile Association of San Antonio, Texas. Prior to that, he was a vice president at Ford Motor Co. from 2004 to 2006. From 2003 to 2004, he was staff director for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which sets policy for most branches of the Energy Department.
From 2001 to 2003, Brouillette was assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental affairs in the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Energy, serving as the agency’s principal liaison to other parts of the executive branch and Congress.
