The House Appropriations Committee on Monday threw its support behind the Trump administration’s new plan to develop interim storage of radioactive waste now held at commercial and government facilities around the nation.
In a 30-21 party-line vote, the Democrat-majority panel advanced its $49.6 billion energy and water bill for fiscal 2021 to the full House. Floor debate is expected during the week of July 27.
Within the $41 billion designated for the Department of Energy is $27.5 million that meets the agency’s request for an Interim Storage and Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program for the budget year starting Oct. 1. That reverses the administration’s prior efforts to end the decade-long freeze on the DOE license application for a waste repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
This did not go unchallenged by some members of the Appropriations Committee. Failure to provide funding for the geologic repository signals a lack of leadership in Congress and at the White House toward finally resolving the decades-long impasse over disposal of the nation’s nuclear waste, Representative Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) said during the markup.
“I’ve already voiced my profound disappointment in the administration’s decision to not include funding for Yucca Mountain in their budget request. I went to the White House after they made this, in my opinion, ill-advised decision to forgo funding in the upcoming fiscal year and told them this issue was too important to play politics with,” he said.
The Appropriations Committee must also accept blame for failing to move Yucca Mountain forward, Newhouse added: “This matter isn’t just in the hands of the White House, though, and the Department of Energy. It is in our hands as well. The bill before us today fails to do its job. We, then are failing to do our jobs.”
The third-term lawmaker’s central Washington congressional district encompasses the Energy Department’s Hanford Site, home to a massive cleanup job after decades of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The site holds 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste, about 10% of which is believed to be high-level waste that after processing would be directed to the Nevada disposal facility.
House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairwoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said the energy bill is a step in the right direction, rather than relitigating Yucca Mountain. Kaptur’s panel developed the energy bill and last week advanced it to the full committee.
“[F]or the first time, this bill provides $20 million for interim storage activities, added to $25 million in research accounts that have been accruing over the years, to try to help us envision how to find alternatives that would actually work,” she said. “We’ve directed the Department of Energy to begin siting work for a federal interim storage facility using a consent-based approach.”
Nuclear waste has been building up in the United States since the start of the Atomic Age. There is now more than 80,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel at active and retired nuclear power plants around the county, an inventory that grows by about 2,000 metric tons each year. Hanford and other Energy Department defense nuclear sites also hold separate stocks of high-level waste, pushing to total amount over 100,000 metric tons.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act set a Jan. 31, 1998, deadline for the Energy Department to begin disposing of that material. Congress amended the bill five years later to designate Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the location for the repository.
The Energy Department filed its license application with the NRC in 2008, near the end of the George W. Bush administration, but President Barack Obama cut off money for licensing two years later. The Obama administration’s own “consent-based” approach for siting separate repositories for defense and commercial waste did not get far before President Donald Trump took office in January 2017.
The White House proposed funding to resume licensing Yucca Mountain in its fiscal 2018, 2019, and 2020 budgets, but was rebuffed on Capitol Hill each time. Lawmakers also last year killed off legislative funding and language aimed at jump-starting interim storage as an expedited solution.
It is “very clear that Congress has chosen not to fund any activity related to what was designated as the final repository in Nevada many years ago,” Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said in a separate hearing Tuesday, before the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee. “And as a result of that we are prohibited from moving forward with that particular repository, and we won’t move forward with that repository until Congress decides it may want to do that.”
Trump signaled the administration’s change in approach on Feb. 6 in a tweet expressing support for Nevada’s opposition to becoming home to other states’ radioactive waste. That was followed in quick succession by White House confirmation that it would not request funding in fiscal 2021 for the Yucca Mountain project, and then the release of the budget that sealed the change.
In its place is the proposed Interim Storage and Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program that would start early work on a temporary, centralized facility to take the waste.
The $27.5 million would pay for a “robust” waste storage program, featuring research and development of storage, transportation, and disposal technologies, “with a focus on systems deployable where there is a willingness to host,” the White House said in February. Anticipated activities include scoping, planning, and development of a program for consolidated interim storage of nuclear waste, including searching for potential sites.
“We’ve just begun that process,” Brouillette said Tuesday. “It will be open, it will be inclusive. I want to work not only with the policymakers here in Congress, but also with the governors and the local officials as well, so that together we might find an appropriate solution.”
Newhouse in early February joined a congressional delegation to the White House that included other supporters of the Yucca approach, including Reps. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) and Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.). They laid out their case for persisting with licensing, while White House and Energy Department officials primarily affirmed the pivot to interim storage.
Since then, Newhouse has repeatedly warned against “playing politics” on the issue, though he has not gone beyond that. Trump is up for re-election in November, and he lost Nevada to Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.
On Monday, Newhouse noted that the U.S. government is on the hook for $2.2 million in daily liabilities to nuclear utilities stuck with used nuclear fuel, for failing to meet its congressional directive to begin disposal of that reactor material more than 22 years ago. The government has already paid out more than $7 billion to those companies.
There was discussion among committee members ahead of Monday’s markup of a possible amendment for Yucca Mountain licensing funding, a congressional source said Tuesday. Supporters ultimately decided to forgo the amendment that was sure to be rejected in favor of raising the matter ahead of the vote.
The House Appropriations Committee bill would break down the $27.5 million along the lines requested by the White House: $20 million on interim storage and the remaining $7.5 million on Nuclear Waste Fund oversight, which Brouillette described in February as the “guns, gates, and guards” needed to protect the Yucca Mountain property. However, the panel expressed qualms about the plan in the legislative report for the energy legislation, released Sunday ahead of the markup.
“The Committee is disappointed with the lack of details in the Department’s proposal for interim storage activities, many of which appear to be generic efforts that have been underway for years and are funded within the Office of Nuclear Energy’s Integrated Waste Management Systems program in this recommendation,” House appropriators wrote.
The Senate has not yet released its 2021 appropriations bills. However, the upper chamber’s top energy and water appropriators, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), have generally supported interim storage as a solution on nuclear waste.
