The drive to restart the Energy Department’s application to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear-waste repository has stalled at least for another three months under a stopgap budget bill expected to become law soon.
Both chambers of Congress by Friday had approved a continuing resolution that funds the federal government for much of the first fiscal quarter of 2018 — starting Oct. 1 — at fiscal 2017 levels. The bill includes no special treatment for either DOE or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Neither agency’s 2017 budget mentions anything about a Yucca license restart. That was part of the Donald Trump administration’s 2018 budget request, which seeks $120 million for DOE and $30 million for the NRC to resume licensing operations halted under the Obama administration.
Now, the agencies will have to sit with their hands in their pockets until after Dec. 8, when the short-term continuing resolution expires. One former DOE hand and longime Yucca advocate said this is particularly problematic for the NRC, which was supposed to start preparing next month to support a years-long confrontation between DOE and an anti-Yucca contingent from Nevada.
Nevada officials including Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) are militantly anti-Yucca and have vowed to oppose DOE’s licensing process at every step. Nevada and its representatives have already filed hundreds of technical contentions with the NRC against the DOE license application the George W. Bush administration filed in 2008, and which the Obama administration effectively canceled in 2010.
A spokesperson for the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute trade group, which supports a Yucca-first approach to nuclear waste disposal, declined to comment for this story.
At the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit in Summerlin, Nev., this week, DOE’s nuclear energy boss said the agency would, regardless of its budget situation, continue work applicable to — if not directly supportive of — Yucca Mountain.
“There is quite a bit that we can do now,” Edward McGinnis, DOE’s acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said Tuesday at the conference. Ultimately, though, “we must stop kicking the can on the back end,” he added.
While the continuing resolution does indeed constitute a temporary kick of that can, a leading Senate appropriator has his foot cocked for a kick that would send the can clear over the horizon.
Where the House agreed to a Yucca restart in a fiscal 2018 spending bill it passed in July, the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee provided no money whatsoever for the project in its version of DOE’s 2018 budget.
Subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) complained after unveiling his panel’s bill that the House was unreasonably insisting on Yucca as a first resort for U.S. nuclear waste when interim storage facilities could be built and begin operating much quicker by private contractors.
Alexander’s bill directs DOE to release a request for proposals for interim waste storage sites no later than 120 days after measure becomes law. Moreover, the bill would essentially resurrect the Obama administration’s consent-based siting policy for nuclear waste by specifying that a consolidated interim storage site could only be built with the approval of the state, local, and tribal governments in whose jurisdiction the site would be built.
The full Senate Appropriations Committee subsequently approved the DOE spending bill with Alexander’s interim storage language, setting up a showdown over Yucca Mountain at a time when the GOP controls every branch of the federal government.
At this point, the continuing resolution means merely an autumn time-out while pro- and anti-Yucca forces in Washington align themselves for a winter barn-burner that started simmering in the middle of summer.
