A House of Representatives committee on Wednesday passed a bill intended to advance centralized storage and permanent disposal of the nation’s nuclear waste, while the long-promised Senate version of the legislation was finally filed.
The effectively identical iterations of the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019 contain a set of measures to assist the Department of Energy in building its planned geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. They would also authorize the agency to establish one or more temporary storage facilities to hold spent nuclear reactor fuel until final disposal is available.
Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), the lead sponsor for the House bill, noted that high-level defense waste and used fuel from nuclear power reactors are held at more than 100 locations in 39 states. Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, it is the Energy Department’s responsibility to deal with that waste – though the agency is more than two decades past the Jan. 31, 1998, deadline to begin disposal.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are swimming in nuclear waste,” McNerney said before the voice vote on the bill. “This hazardous logjam puts communities at risk and inhibits our ability to integrate nuclear power into a robust, emissions reducing agenda to combat the impending threats of climate change.”
The bill now waits for consideration by the full House. Lawmakers from Nevada, who uniformly oppose making their state home to other states’ radioactive waste, left little doubt they would fight to keep it off the House floor: “Not on my watch,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) tweeted on Thursday.
A 2017 version of the legislation, filed by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), advanced out of the committee and the House on persuasively bipartisan votes, but never got a vote in the Senate before the 115th Congress ended on Jan. 3 of this year. Shimkus is a co-sponsor to the refreshed legislation.
“It will be difficult for Shimkus to get a floor vote on this bill, especially because the House Rules Committee will need to rule on it,” Bob Halstead, who leads Nevada’s campaign against Yucca Mountain as head of the state’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, said in a statement Wednesday. “Also there is no new congressional appropriation for Yucca Mountain, so this bill by itself would do nothing to restart Yucca Mountain even if it passed the Senate, which it will not.”
Asked about the chances for the bill to receive a House vote, a Shimkus spokesman on Thursday said only, “Stay tuned.” The vocal Yucca Mountain proponent is not seeking re-election in 2020.
The Department of Energy in 2008 filed its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate the repository about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later, eventually embarking on a “consent-based” process to site separate repositories for commercial and defense waste. The Trump administration returned to Yucca Mountain upon taking office in 2017, but in three budget cycles has failed to persuade Congress to appropriate money to resume licensing.
In making their case for the bill, McNerney and other lawmakers focused on the need for permanent disposal of radioactive used fuel, roughly 80,000 metric tons of which is now stored at active and retired nuclear power plants around the nation. The California lawmaker highlighted the state’s shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in his state, where 3.5 million pounds of used fuel assemblies are on-site in wet and dry storage in a heavily populated, seismically active region.
Some committee members also emphasized that waste from defense nuclear sites including the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Hanford Site in Washington state. Savannah River stores roughly 8,000 metric tons of waste that has been converted to a glass form and awaits final disposal, plus 35 million gallons of high-level liquid waste, Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said.
“This is a national issue and it requires a national remedy,” he said. “Due to the federal government’s inability to finish the safety licensing process for a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, the cost to the American taxpayer to pay for this inaction has more than doubled to more than $35 billion since 2009. This figure will continue to rapidly increase.”
While he did not specify, Duncan might have been referring to the federal government’s projected liability to nuclear utilities that have sued to recoup costs for continued management of their spent fuel after the 1998 deadline. The government has already paid out more than $7 billion, on top of $15 billion of research and development that proponents say proved the Yucca site is safe for radioactive waste disposal.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) on Wednesday introduced the upper chamber’s version of the legislation, after announcing a discussion draft in April. The Senate Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019 was assigned to the Environment and Public Works Committee, which Barrasso chairs.
“My legislation will advance the safety review of the Yucca Mountain facility,” Barrasso said in a statement. “It also takes important steps to strengthen the nation’s nuclear waste management program. The House of Representatives has advanced a bipartisan bill out of committee. I look forward to gaining similar bipartisan support in the Senate.”
Among the measures in both bills:
- Authorizing the Department of Energy to site, build, and manage at least one “monitored retrievable storage facility,” and to contract for storage of agency-owned waste by a federally licensed commercial operation. (Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in October that DOE does not have authority to contract directly for interim storage under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.)
- Prioritizing storage of used fuel from retired facilities that are in seismically active regions near a significant body of water.
- Requiring the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue a final decision on licensing a repository before waste can be stored at the first interim facility.
- Transferring management of the Yucca Mountain property from the Interior Department to DOE, which would then prioritize use of that land for the Yucca Mountain project.
- Increasing the maximum legal capacity of the repository from 70,000 metric tons to 110,000 metric tons.
The only differences between the bills are two amendments added to the House version on Wednesday.
One amendment, from Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) establishes a grant funding program to research the epidemiological impacts of uranium mining and milling on individuals who were not performing the work, such as family members of miners and millers.
The second amendment, from Reps. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Fred Upton (R-Mich.), provides a “sense of Congress” against extended storage or permanent disposal of radioactive waste near the Great Lakes, in either the United States or Canada. The same message was inserted into the 2017 bill from Shimkus. During the markup, Dingell made clear the language is primarily aimed at Canada, where the government is considering plans from an Ontario utility for a deep geologic repository near Lake Huron for low-level and intermediate-level waste.
Even as he successfully added an amendment to the McNerney bill, Lujan said he would vote against it. His primary concern is over its language on interim storage of used fuel. Two corporate teams are seeking federal licenses for such storage facilities: one in southeastern New Mexico, the other just across the state border in Texas.
Quoting former Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), Lujan said: “Interim storage can play an important role in a comprehensive waste management program, but only as a part as an integral part of the repository program and not as an alternative to or de-facto substitute for permanent disposal. I worry that this bill makes it more likely that a future interim storage site, potentially on in New Mexico, becomes a permanent home for nuclear waste.”
Elsewhere on Capitol Hill
Meanwhile, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday passed a nuclear power bill that has been stripped of language authorizing $200 million in annual research on storage and disposal of radioactive waste.
The amended version of S. 2368, from Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), passed by voice vote with a number of other bills. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) voted against the measure.
The Coons-McSally bill is primarily intended to help sustain the nation’s current fleet of nuclear power plants and promote development of advanced nuclear reactor technologies.
However, the original version of the legislation featured a section on a fuel cycle research and development program. That section called on the secretary to energy to conduct a program of research covering consent-based interim storage; transportation of nuclear waste; and possible alternative means of disposal for DOE-managed spent fuel, high-level radioactive waste, and defense-related waste.
Had that language passed, it would have authorized $200 million yearly for this work from fiscal 2020 to 2029.
The committee, though, passed an amendment in the nature of a substitute that eliminates the fuel cycle research section.
A spokesperson for McSally referred questions about changes to the bill to Coons’ office, which did not respond to a query.
