The Democrat-led House of Representatives on Wednesday further cemented its newfound rejection of funding licensing for a nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev.
In a 226-203 vote, the House approved a nearly $1 trillion “minibus” appropriations bill that would fund the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, respectively the applicant and adjudicator for the Yucca Mountain license, along with a number of other federal agencies.
No Republican lawmaker voted for the bill, which had the backing of all but seven voting Democrats.
The energy and water development portion of the funding minibus would provide $47.5 million for “integrated management” of U.S. radioactive waste. That would include $25 million to start the process for moving spent fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors into centralized storage until a repository is available.
In its 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Congress gave the Energy Department until Jan. 31, 1998, to begin disposing of spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste from federal defense nuclear operations. It amended the bill in 1987 to specify Yucca Mountain, federal property about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the sole destination for what is now roughly 100,000 metric tons of material.
The Energy Department filed its license application with the NRC in 2008, during the George W. Bush administration. The Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later, but the Trump White House has reversed course again in favor of Yucca Mountain.
The Republican-led House supported Trump administration funding requests for fiscal 2018 and 2019 to resume licensing. However, the Senate preferred to fund consolidated interim storage as a means of expediting the relocation of stranded spent fuel. Ultimately no money was approved for either approach.
After Democrats took the majority in the November midterms, the House now appears unfriendly to Yucca Mountain. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said directly she will prevent any appropriation for licensing.
Republicans took two shots at adding money for licensing to the energy and water bill, to no avail. The House Appropriations Committee in May rejected an amendment from Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) to provide $74 million for the program before advancing the measure. Then the House Rules Committee last week declined Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) proposal to add $15 million for the same purpose before setting up debate on the bill.
“Congressman Shimkus is obviously frustrated that funds weren’t included in the House bill this year,” spokesman Jordan Haverly said by email Thursday. “We’ll closely follow the expected vote in the Senate as well as the conference negotiations when they occur.:
In making their cases, the Republican lawmakers noted that the Yucca money would be used solely for seeing the licensing process through to its conclusion, at which point the NRC would determine whether it is safe to proceed with construction and operations. That did not sway Nevada’s congressional delegation, which remains intractably opposed to any measure that would bring nuclear waste from other states closer to being deposited in theirs.
“It’s official! @HouseDemocrats passed our appropriations bill without any funding for Yucca Mountain,” Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) tweeted on Wednesday. “We worked tirelessly to keep the Trump Administration from making our state the dumping ground for the nation’s nuclear waste. This is a major and decisive victory for Nevada.”
The Senate Appropriations Committee has not yet produced any funding bills for fiscal 2020.
Train Derailment Reloads Yucca Debate
Meanwhile, a Wednesday morning freight train derailment in Nevada sparked a sharp debate over the safety of potentially shipping radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain by rail.
Twenty-three cars derailed about 11 a.m. on the Union Pacific railroad track in Elko County. No one was injured. Railcars that did not derail carried some unidentified hazardous material and explosive munitions on their way to the Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada, according to Union Pacific spokesman Tim McMahan and local new reports. The cause of the derailment remains under investigation.
“My team has been in contact with the Federal Railroad Administration as we continue to monitor this situation. This is just another example of why it would be so dangerous to transport tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste to Nevada,” Titus tweeted on Wednesday.
The Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce echoed that sentiment in its own tweet: “Imagine if this train was carrying nuclear waste. Another reason why the Las Vegas Chamber is adamantly opposed to any storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.”
But Haverly pushed back against the message that the derailment illustrates one danger posed by Yucca Mountain. “For one thing, none of the materials bound for Yucca Mountain are explosive. For another, the same materials that are bound for Yucca Mnt have been moved across the country thousands of times for more than 40 years with no harm to human health or the environment,” he wrote on Twitter.
Haverly cited a 2014 Nuclear Regulatory Commission report that stated, “If there were an accident during a spent fuel shipment, there is only about one-in-a-billion chance that the accident would result in a release of radioactive material.”
Th same NRC report concluded only rail casks without inner welded canisters would release radioactive material, and only then in exceptionally severe accidents. It added that if there was a release of radioactive material in a spent fuel shipment accident, the dose to the maximally exposed individual would be less than 200 rem and “would not result in an acute lethality.”
