Christopher Hanson was scheduled to testify Wednesday before a pair of House subcommittees about the Nuclear Regulatory’s 2022 budget request, power plant decommissioning and nuclear waste management.
The joint hearing of the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee and climate change subcommittee was scheduled to air on the committee’s website at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time. NRC commissioners Jeff Baran and David Wright will also attend the hearing, according to a committee briefing posted online.
This will be Hanson’s first appearance in Congress since the former staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) took over as chair of the NRC around inauguration day. Hanson has been on the commission for a little more than a year now and faces his congressional overseers at a time when proposed commercial interim storage sites face entrenched resistance from their potential host states and with the Joe Biden administration still basically mum about its plans for managing tons of spent fuel from nuclear power plants.
The administration has said it will not bless a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., but had yet at deadline to say exactly what it proposed to do instead. The DOE requested $27 million to prepare for a so-called consent-based siting of a federally managed interim storage facility for nuclear waste, but the budget request, and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, have not been forthcoming about the specifics.
NRC’s budget request, published June 30, said that of the $888 million required for its operations in fiscal 2022, around $757 million would be recovered from licensee fees, leaving Congress to pick up roughly $131 million of the tab. The agency’s overall request was up about 5% year-over-year from $844 million.
