A contingent of members of the House of Representatives on Tuesday urged a key appropriations panel to meet the Trump administration’s latest request to fund resumption of licensing for the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
At least 10 lawmakers spoke in favor of the White House’s approach during the member hearing day before the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
“It is time the federal government stop kicking the can down the road. Doing this for 40 years has resulted in about 80,000 tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel and 14,000 tons of defense waste currently scattered in temporary storage over 100 sites,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said in his prepared comments to the panel.
Specifically, Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) said, there are 121 locations in 31 states still holding used nuclear power reactor fuel or high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations, more than two decades past the deadline set by Congress for the Department of Energy to begin taking the material for disposal.
For the federal 2020 budget year, the Energy Department is requesting $116 million for nuclear waste management operations, with at least $85.6 million applied directly to advancing the license application it filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008. The NRC wants $38.5 million to resume adjudication of the application, a process frozen nearly a decade ago by the Obama administration.
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) told the subcommittee he strongly supported the White House request – “In fact, if you doubled it, it would even be better.”
The House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee will write the lower chamber’s first draft of the spending bill covering DOE and the NRC. The House has supported the Trump administration requests in the last two budget cycles for Yucca licensing, and in fact last year did add $100 million to the Energy Department proposal. However, the program each time got nothing in the final version of the energy measure after House-Senate negotiations.
Shimkus, perhaps Congress’ most prominent supporter of the Nevada repository, described in detail the federal government’s efforts starting in the mid-20th century to find a final resting place for the nation’s growing stockpile of nuclear waste.
That led Congress to pass the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act directing the Energy Department to by Jan. 31, 1998, begin taking spent reactor fuel high-level radioactive waste for permanent disposal. While the original plan was to build two repositories, the law was amended in 1987 to designate the Yucca Mountain federal property, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the sole recipient.
The state of Nevada alone filed more than 200 technical and legal contentions against the license with the NRC before the proceeding was suspended. It has also sued the federal government several times in hopes of heading off the facility.
Appearing before the subcommittee, Shimkus said resuming licensing would enable Nevada to argue the science on whether the location is suitable for geologic disposal of nuclear waste.
State leaders say there are multiple reasons to keep the waste out of the region: the potential contamination of groundwater, the state’s seismic activity, and endangering the crucial tourism industry, to start. Shimkus, meanwhile, said 21 volumes of scientific and engineering research from the Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission show the isolated selected location is safe. It cost $15 billion just to reach that conclusion, he said.
During the last Congress, Shimkus sponsored the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, which featured a number of measures to strengthen the federal government’s ability to move forward with both Yucca Mountain and centralized, interim storage of the waste until the repository is ready. The bill passed overwhelmingly out of the House in May 2018, but never got a hearing or a vote in the Senate.
Nuclear utilities paid billions of dollars into the Nuclear Waste Fund that is intended to pay for construction and operations of the repository. The fund now holds about $40 billion, Shimkus told the panel. The federal government is also paying $2 million per day to utilities from its judgment fund over DOE’s failure over two decades to meet its legal obligation to begin taking their spent fuel, he said.
“The money that we’re asking for does not turn one shovel of dirt. That’s unfortunate, because we need to move forward,” according to Shimkus.
Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) alone flew the flag during the hearing for Nevada’s long-held opposition to becoming home to other states’ radioactive waste. “We don’t use nuclear energy, we don’t produce nuclear waste, and we shouldn’t be forced to store it,” she said in testimony before the panel.
Titus and her colleagues from the Silver Statee have been active as it became clear the administration would again seek funding for the program: urging appropriators to reject the request, filing legislation requiring consent from local, state, and tribal governments for disposal of nuclear waste; and reminding President Donald Trump that last October he suggested the administration would consider an alternative to Yucca Mountain.
After canceling Yucca Mountain, the Obama administration took up the 2012 recommendation of its Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to initiate a consent-based approach to selecting locations for waste storage and disposal. But that plan did not get far before President Barack Obama ceded the White House to Trump.
Speaking from the dais, subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said there is no future for consent-based siting.
“I know of no community that will become a permanent repository for nuclear waste based on consent,” he told Titus after the Nevada lawmaker urged just such an approach.
Waiting for that result could actually endanger efforts to move spent fuel into consolidated interim storage sites, which would be intended to help DOE meet its legal directive until the repository is ready, Simpson said.
Two corporate teams have applied for NRC licenses for separate storage sites in southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. However, those communities might resist the projects if they have reason to believe they would be stuck with the waste permanently because no other site would accept a permanent location, according to the Idaho congressman.
Lawmakers on both sides of the dais expressed cautious optimism that Congress this year can break the impasse on funding for Yucca Mountain.
The Senate in recent years has focused on appropriating funds for interim storage of spent fuel as the quickest means of removing the material from nuclear power plants. For example, the upper chamber’s energy and water appropriations legislation for the current fiscal 2019 called for funding “consolidate spent nuclear fuel from around the United States to one or more private or government interim central storage facilities.” That, too, was zeroed out in the House-Senate dispute over the best approach for nuclear waste management.
However, Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has in this budget cycle suggested willingness to write in money for Yucca Mountain.
“It does appear that we’re on the cusp of actually getting something through,” Upton said. “But we have to take the initiative in the House. But it does appear that the Senate, particularly with the members that are there, Senator Alexander and [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell, are ready to have a vote on the issue.”
The House Appropriations Committee does not yet have any details regarding the schedule or content of its bills for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, a spokesman said. There was also no firm word this week from the Senate Appropriations energy panel.
