One, and only one, of Nevada’s U.S. senators on Thursday asked the Senate Appropriations Committee not to include any funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the stopgap spending bill Congress must produce this month to keep the federal government funded through September.
“As you finalize legislation to continue funding for the Fiscal Year 2017, I respectfully request that you honor the wishes of the State of Nevada and exclude any funding focused on licensing a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain from that proposal,” Sen. Dean Heller (R) wrote in a letter to Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), respectively the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
It was not immediately clear whether Heller’s letter was the first public indication that other lawmakers are quietly trying to find funds to restart the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process for Yucca Mountain a year before the Donald Trump administration proposed doing so, or whether Heller was merely restating his long-held opposition to the proposed repository for defense and commercial nuclear waste.
Heller’s was the only signature on the letter, the text of which the senior senator from Nevada posted on his website. Heller’s colleague Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), also a staunch Yucca opponent, did not sign the missive. Neither Cortez Masto nor Heller’s office replied to requests for comment Thursday.
Congress is out of session and not set to return until the week of April 24, four days before the stopgap budget bill that froze federal spending at fiscal 2016 levels expires. That gives lawmakers less than a week to agree on spending levels for the rest of the 2017 fiscal year, after they return to Washington.
In March, the Trump administration proposed spending $120 million in fiscal 2018 to revive the government’s license application for Yucca Mountain and move ahead with “a robust interim storage program” that would pool spent fuel from different power plants at temporary storage facilities.
Restarting Yucca would render moot the Obama administration’s plans to store nuclear waste created during the Cold War arms races in a separate geological facility known as a Defense Waste Repository. The Nevada facility was designed with both spent fuel and legacy waste in mind.
Meanwhile, Nevada state officials met the administration’s plan to revive Yucca with howls and renewed vows to kill the project once and for all.
On Monday, Nevada’s State Assembly moved an anti-Yucca resolution a step closer to passage by the state’s bicameral legislature.
Assembly Joint Resolution No. 10, advanced to the full Assembly this week by the chamber’s Commerce and Labor Committtee, “protests in the strongest possible terms, any attempt by the United States Congress to resurrect the dangerous and ill-conceived repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain,” according to the text of the measure posted online.
The measure had not been scheduled for a vote in the full chamber at deadline for Weapons Complex Monitor. If passed by both chambers, the resolution would become the state Legislature’s official position. Nevada’s legislative season is scheduled to run through June 5.
Twenty-five assembly members and nine state senators introduced the resolution on March 15, a day before Trump publicly released the budget blueprint containing plans to reverse the Obama administration’s 2010 decision to halt the Yucca licensing process. Cortez Masto has publicly supported the resolution, as have Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and state Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt.
Over the objections of the state, Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain in Nye County as the sole disposal site for U.S. high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants. The nuclear power industry sees a permanent repository as crucial to ensuring its future, while environmental groups and the proposed host state, which has no reactors within its borders, have become allies of opportunity in the fight against Yucca.
