Nearly a week after a technically bipartisan delegation of House members and staff visited Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., lawmakers still have not set a date to begin final negotiations on a 2019 budget bill that, technically, could include funding for the proposed waste-repository.
Those negotiations, a bicameral conference committee of lawmakers from the House and Senate, were supposed to start July 12. They were abruptly called off on account of what majority Republicans called “scheduling conflicts.” As of deadline Friday, the meetings had not been rescheduled.
House and Senate appropriations spokespersons did not reply to requests for comment about why lawmakers, after a week, were unable to reschedule the conference meeting for H.R. 5895: a so-called minibus appropriations act for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The measure consolidates three of the 12 annual appropriations bills, including an Energy and Water Appropriations bill with the Department of Energy (DOE) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) budgets for 2019.
In the bill, the House proposed $35.5 billion for DOE in fiscal 2019, while the Senate recommended about $35 billion. For the NRC, the House suggested $950 million or so, while the Senate proposed around $900 million.
Elsewhere in the budget, both chambers recommended about $7 billion in 2019 for the Cold War nuclear-waste-cleanup programs run by DOE’s Environmental Management office. The Senate minibus passed June 25, would set $7.2 billion in total funding for the cleanup office. That is $300 million more than the $6.9 billion passed by the House in its own minibus on June 8.
The ongoing disagreement over Yucca Mountain accounts for part of the difference, and the roster of the minibus conference committee features more conspicuous Yucca skeptics than Yucca allies.
Notable among the Senate conferees is the influential Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who as ranking member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that writes DOE’s annual budget bill has repeatedly attacked the House for insisting on a Yucca-first solution to the country’s 70,000-plus-ton backlog of unburied spent fuel.
The House’s minibus proposed $270 million for DOE and Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing programs for Yucca Mountain. That is $100 million more than the White House sought for the project in 2019. The Senate, as it did for 2018, recommended no funding for Yucca.
Yucca has yet to receive an appropriation since President Donald Trump took office and recommended restarting the process to license the site as a permanent waste repository. The Barack Obama administration suspended the license in 2011.
Meanwhile, Yucca’s drum major in the House, Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), continues his advocacy for the proposed waste-repository. Shimkus returned to Washington this week after a scorching, midsummer-weekend tour of Yucca, for which he was joined by 11 other House members.
