A budget markup of the Joe Biden administration’s Build Back Better Act made its way through the House’s energy panel Tuesday, with the majority shaking off a couple of attempts by Republicans to get more nuclear energy in the mix.
The energy subsection of Congress’s budget reconciliation recommendations passed on a 30-27 party-line vote during a House Energy and Commerce Committee meeting Tuesday. The energy reconciliation package, which includes proposed tax credits for clean electricity generators, does not directly mention nuclear energy.
The committee vote hammered out some parts of the Biden administration’s energy budget that needed to be addressed under budget reconciliation rules.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.V.) offered an amendment to make explicit congressional support for nuclear energy, calling it the “largest, most reliable and safest” form of energy in the U.S. McKinley’s amendment failed on a largely partisan vote. Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) was the only Democrat to vote in favor.
Although the reconciliation recommendations didn’t include nuclear, the $3.5 trillion partisan 2022 budget would, through a separate appropriations bill, unlock roughly $1.8 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
The appropriations bills would also allocate roughly $20 million for DOE to begin exploring the possibility of a federal interim storage facility for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel. The House has approved its energy appropriations bill, as has the Senate Appropriations Committee.
