The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday turned back an effort to resume licensing of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository as it approved legislation to fund the Department of Energy and other agencies for fiscal 2020.
In the late minutes of a seven-hour markup of two appropriations bills, the Democrat-led panel voted 25-27 against approving an amendment from Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) that would have provided more than $74 million for licensing the disposal site in Nevada. The committee then quickly voted 31-21 to report the full $46.6 billion energy and water development appropriations bill for a vote on the House floor.
The was the latest setback in efforts by the Trump administration, along with supporters of the Yucca Mountain project in Congress, to reverse the Obama administration’s defunding of licensing nearly a decade ago.
Instead, for the budget year starting Oct. 1, the energy legislation would provide $47.5 million for integrated management of the nation’s nuclear waste, including $25 million for operations to centralize spent reactor fuel now held-on site at nuclear power plants around the nation into temporary storage.
As it has in the past two budget cycles, so far without success, the White House in March asked Congress to appropriate funds to restart the Nuclear Regulatory Commission technical review of the Department of Energy license application filed in 2008. For fiscal 2020, the NRC asked for $38.5 million for licensing and DOE sought $116 million for licensing and interim storage.
The House bill rolled out last week zeroed out that request, but Simpson attempted to claw some of it back.
His amendment would have shifted over $74 million from other areas of the energy and water appropriations bill for disposal of commercial and defense nuclear waste. Among those: $5 million would have been cut from the $203 million expenses budget for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; nearly $10 million would have been removed from the $873.5 million Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund for DOE nuclear cleanup sites; and roughly $14 million would have been stripped from the $264.4 million line item for Energy Department administration expenses and salaries.
The Simpson proposal would have added all-new sections to the bill on nuclear waste disposal and defense nuclear waste disposal. In both cases, the new language would cover “Department of Energy expenses necessary for nuclear waste disposal activities to carry out the purposes of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as amended.”
The 1982 legislation put the Energy Department in charge of disposal of the nation’s stockpile of spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations. The 1987 amendment directed that the material be buried under Yucca Mountain. The deadline to begin taking material for disposal, long since passed, was Jan. 31, 1998. The waste stockpile today now stands at somewhere around 100,000 metric tons at dozens of locations.
The federal government has spent billions of dollars to study the best location for the repository, Simpson said before the vote on his amendment. The amount today is usually put around $15 billion. The end result is that it is “clear that Yucca Mountain is the most promising location to meet all safety, security, and environmental requirements,” he said.
Nevada disagrees, citing a long list of concerns including the state’s active seismology and the potential harm to the crucial tourism industry. It has vehemently opposed the license application, filing more than 200 technical and legal contentions with the NRC before the proceeding was suspended. It has promised more should it resume.
The House backed Trump administration requests for Yucca Mountain licensing funding in fiscal 2018 and 2019, but could never get the money past the Senate. Democrats then retook control of the lower chamber ahead of the latest budget cycle.
In making the case for his amendment before the committee, Simpson emphasized that the funding would not finance any actual work on the repository, but simply advance the process of determining whether it is a fit location for disposal. He noted that 48 of the 53 House appropriators are from states stuck with nuclear waste.
“This amendment continues the licensing application process which will provide the answers the public needs about long-term safety at the site. It is through the licensing process that opponents of the Yucca Mountain site will have the opportunity to be heard and to make their case before a panel of administrative judges,” Simpson, ranking member and former chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water development committee that wrote the first draft of the bill, told his colleagues.
Simpson emphasized the price of inaction – the $17 billion that nuclear utilities paid into the federal fund to build the repository, plus the U.S. government’s growing liability for failure to meet its legal obligation under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to begin disposing of the waste more than 21 years ago. That liability is $2.2 million per day, he said.
Energy and water subcommittee Chair Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) countered that the bill as written provides a more expedited approach to removing the waste from its current storage sites.
“We can do better than have a tired old argument about Yucca Mountain, as opposed in this amendment,” she said. “Even if we started today, Yucca Mountain is decades from accepting waste for permanent disposal. In the measure we are offering in the bill today, we have a better idea.”
Interim sites could be licensed and built in under five years, according to Kaptur. She did not make direct reference to two corporate teams that have already applied for NRC licenses for storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico. The agency is expected to complete the technical reviews of those applications by the middle of next year, after which it would issue decisions.
The proposed $47.5 million for integrated waste management would encompass $25 million “for interim storage activities, including the initiation of a robust consolidated interim storage program, including site preparation activities at stranded sites, to evaluate the re-initiation of regional transport compacts, and transportation coordination,” according to the committee report for the appropriations bill.
Kaptur’s office did not respond to requests for additional detail on how the money would be used.
The Senate Appropriations Committee has not yet released its version of the energy and water bill. In recent years it also tried to fund interim storage, but ran up against the Yucca-focused House.
Integrated waste management was the core of the Obama administration’s consent-based approach for siting temporary storage and permanent disposal locations for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. That program would have involved pilot storage facilities, prioritizing used fuel from retired nuclear power plants; full-scale consolidated interim storage; and ultimately separate repositories for commercial and defense waste.
