The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee on Monday approved a $44.7-billion energy funding bill for fiscal 2019, including extra money for the planned Yucca Mountain radioactive waste disposal repository in Nevada.
A full committee markup is scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday. The bill report, which provides a more detailed look at proposed funding for individual programs, will be published a day before the panel marks up the measure, a committee aide said Monday by email.
The Department of Energy would receive a 5-percent budget raise from fiscal 2018, to roughly $36 million, if the bill becomes law. Overall, the proposed budget is about 20 percent more than the White House sought in a 2019 budget request that was released before Congress lifted spending caps on federal agencies including DOE.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would receive $953.1 million for salaries and expenses, plus another $12.6 million for its Inspector General’s Office. That would be slightly less than the $970.7 million the agency requested in February for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
The House measure calls for the NRC to collect $763.6 million from licensing fees, inspection services, and other collections for salaries and expenses. The IG would get $10.4 million from such sources. Remaining funding would come from congressional appropriations.
The bill would provide nearly $270 million between the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to resume efforts to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent repository for spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The bill meets the White House’s request for the commission’s part of the work, about $48 million, but adds $100 million to the $120 million the Donald Trump administration sought for DOE’s share in 2019.
“Funding above the budget request will be used to accelerate progress toward meeting the federal government’s legal obligation to take responsibility for storing the nation’s nuclear waste,” the subcommittee wrote in a summary of its bill on May 6.
Yucca Mountain still faces stiff opposition in the Senate, where lawmakers ignored the administration’s request to restart licensing last year, and Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) has again pledged to block funding for the effort during the upper chamber’s annual appropriations process.
Heller Presses NRC to Hold Yucca Hearings in Nevada
Heller wants to ensure the Department of Energy’s application to license Yucca Mountain is judged in the state, according to the latest published missive in a long-running letter-writing campaign.
“[W]ill you commit to holding key substantive portions of the Yucca Mountain proceeding in Nevada should administrative adjudication be restarted and sufficient resources become available?” Heller wrote in a Tuesday letter to Kristine Svinicki, chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
Heller began a letter-writing campaign to Svinicki almost as soon as she was confirmed as NRC chair last year and has since at least March sought to pin her down about the location of possible future licensing proceedings. Svinicki has told Heller the NRC is still shopping for venues, and will broaden its search when and if Congress provides the roughly $48 million the commission requested for Yucca licensing activities in 2019.
In a May 1 letter to Heller, Svinicki said the NRC has yet to find a suitable site to hold licensing proceedings in Nevada. The commission considered federal properties at Las Vegas, Reno, and Pahrump, but determined they are not large enough, Svinicki wrote. The NRC might host the licensing proceedings at its Rockville, Md., headquarters, or conduct them remotely using “virtual courtroom” technology.
In a follow-up letter on May 3, Svinicki said technological improvements have enabled licensing boards to more regularly use remote sessions to save time and money.
Heller, in the letter dated Tuesday, asked Svinicki by May 22 to give him a yes-or-no answer about conducting the licensing process in-person in Nevada.
