The House approved this week a temporary budget bill for fiscal year 2023, setting up most Department of Energy nuclear waste programs to continue operating at their 2022 budgets through Dec. 16.
For the first two-and-a-half months of fiscal year 2023, the stopgap bill would give DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), which runs civilian nuclear waste programs, the roughly $1.65-billion budget it had in Congress’s 2022 omnibus appropriations law from March.
The House of Representatives Friday afternoon passed the spending plan on a 230-201 vote, sending the stopgap on its way to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature. The Senate passed the continuing resolution bill on a 72-25 vote Thursday, just days before the Senate was set to return home to campaign ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The 2023 fiscal year begins at 12:00 a.m. on Oct. 1. At deadline Friday the House had yet to vote on the continuing resolution.
Under the 2022 spending plan, NE’s Integrated Waste Management System line, part of the Fuel Cycle Research and Development subprogram, would get about $18 million. That funding is significantly lower than the $53 million or so approved by the House in June and the $40 million greenlit by Senate appropriators in July.
DOE had proposed moving funding for its ongoing interim storage inquiry under the Integrated Waste Management program and away from its Nuclear Waste Disposal account for the 2023 fiscal year.
NE’s Used Nuclear Fuel Disposition Research and Development line would remain at around $50 million in funding under the continuing resolution, a similar figure to the department’s 2023 request of roughly $47 million, which the House and Senate Appropriations Committee both approved earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the autonomous civilian nuclear power regulator, would get about $874 million under the stopgap budget, compared with the roughly $911 million proposed by both chambers of Congress for fiscal 2023.
The independent Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board would be funded at around $3.8 million, around 3% lower than the $4 million or so proposed for 2023 by congressional appropriators.
