Last-minute efforts this week on Capitol Hill to funnel money into programs for storage and permanent disposal of the nation’s nuclear waste sputtered out quietly, overshadowed by Congress’ showdown with President Donald Trump over the federal budget.
The seeminly quixotic endeavors were connected to congressional efforts to craft a budget funding the Homeland Security Department and a handful of other agencies past the expiration at midnight today of their short-term appropriations.
The Department of Energy and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) tried unsuccessfully to add tens of millions of dollars for the long-delayed Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository in Nevada in follow-on spending legislation. Separately, Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) attempted to add $120 million for nuclear waste management to the proposed continuing resolution that would sustain full government operations until Feb. 8, but the House Rules Committee apparently was not taking amendments.
Neither item garnered much attention as Trump threatened to veto any appropriations legislation that did not include $5 billion for a border wall between the United States and Mexico. The House passed a bill with the funding Thursday, but its chances in the Senate appeared questionable at deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor. That could any agency that has not already received full fiscal 2019 funding through next Sept. 30 will largely close in a matter of hours.
Still, these developments represent the latest instances of failure in the federal government’s decades-old attempt to meet its congressional directive to find a permanent home for the nation’s radioactive waste.
Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain as the eventual site for disposal of tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear work. The George W. Bush administration Department of Energy filed its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008, but the Obama administration halted the proceeding two years later. The Trump administration has sought funding to resume licensing in its first two budget proposals, but has been denied twice by Congress.
The waste remains held on-site at its points of generation, including nuclear power plants in more than 30 states. Nuclear utilities paid about $40 billion into the federal Nuclear Waste Fund intended to pay for the repository and to date have collected more than $7 billion in damages from the U.S. Treasury for DOE’s failure to start taking their spent fuel by the congressional deadline of Jan. 31, 1998. That liability is expected to exceed $30 billion.
The Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission received full-year funding in a multi-agency budget bill signed into law in September. But they got nothing of the nearly $170 million requested for Yucca Mountain licensing.
There has been much discussion around Washington in recent weeks that lawmakers might slip money for Yucca Mountain into the follow-on to the existing continuing resolution. However, there was no language on radioactive waste in the nine-page measure the Senate approved late Wednesday or the 59-page version the House passed Thursday.
Sources played down the likelihood that such funding would appear early next year in any bill designed to keep the government going throughout fiscal 2019.
Providing money for Yucca Mountain “on a potential omnibus for FY19 would have essentially meant we were including it on an unrelated bill since Congress already passed the Energy and Water bill to fund those relevant agencies,” a source on Capitol Hill said by email Wednesday. “Senator Alexander seems to have indicated that effort is over based on his recent press statements.”
A spokesman confirmed Tuesday the Politico report that Alexander, the Senate’s lead appropriator for DOE and the NRC, had proposed $70 million for nuclear waste management for the remainder of fiscal 2019. That would have provided $30 million each for Yucca Mountain licensing activities at the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The remaining $10 million would have been used for work to consolidate spent fuel from nuclear power plants at a small number of locations until the repository is ready. The Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which manages its nuclear waste work, would have provided $60 million; the rest would have come from the Naval Reactors office within DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, according to Politico.
The Energy Department had reportedly sought authority to redirect $120 million in unobligated funds to the Yucca Mountain program, from its Nuclear Energy and Environmental Management offices and NNSA nonproliferation operations.
One informed source said this week the proposed congressional funding might have represented something of a fig leaf for the quiet death of Shimkus’ Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, which was intended to help resolve the national nuclear waste impasse – with a focus on advancing Yucca Mountain. The bill passed out of the House on a strong 340-72 vote in May, but never got a hearing at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. With the 115th Congress nearly over, the bill would have to be refiled in the next Congress scheduled to gavel in on Jan. 3.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), ranking member on the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee chaired by Alexander, was a key roadblock to funding from Capitol Hill for Yucca Mountain, the source said.
Shimkus spokesman Jordan Haverly said the funding question is ultimately up to appropriators and leadership in Congress. Representatives for Feinstein and Alexander did not provide details about how the process played out.
Shimkus this week tried a Hail-Mary pass on nuclear waste via amendments to the proposed continuing resolution.
The shorter of the two, just four pages, would have provided $90 million from the Nuclear Waste Fund to the Department of Energy for civilian “nuclear waste disposal activities … including the acquisition of any real property or facility construction, or expansion, and interim storage activities.” The agency would have received another $30 million for defense nuclear waste disposal operations and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have also received $30 million.
The other amendment was cited directly as the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2018, serving as a slimmed down version of Shimkus’ earlier bill. Much of its language focused on “monitored retrievable storage” – sending waste to facilities from which it could eventually be recovered for permanent disposal.
That approach is more commonly called consolidated interim storage today. Two companies have applied for 40-year NRC licenses to build and operate separate facilities for spent fuel in Texas and New Mexico.
Among the measures in the Shimkus amendment: Authorizing the secretary of energy to update existing new contracts or seal new deals to take title to spent fuel and high-level waste for transport to storage; requiring DOE to issue a request for information to assist in assessing options for at least one interim storage site; and prioritizing storage of DOE-owned civilian waste at a monitored retrievable storage site.
Shimkus’ amendments were among five submitted for the House bill. Haverly said the Rules Committee disallowed all amendments; a spokesperson for the panel did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.
The next major development in nuclear waste management is likely to be the rollout of the fiscal 2020 budget proposal in February. The Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission have not said whether they will again ask for funds for Yucca Mountain licensing.
“[T]he State of Nevada will continue to oppose the DOE license application currently before the NRC, and is prepared to oppose DOE and NRC in new federal lawsuits as necessary,” Robert Halstead, executive director of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, said by email Thursday.
