For the second year in a row, the House and Senate have set up a showdown over whether to fund the Donald Trump administration’s request to license a permanent nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The Senate on Monday passed a so-called minibus appropriations package that includes $35 billion for the Department of Energy (DOE), about another $900 million for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and no money whatsoever at either agency for Yucca Mountain.
The House earlier this month approved a 2019 minibus bill with a combined $270 million for Yucca between DOE and NRC. That is $100 million more than the White House sought for licensing the long-delayed waste repository proposed for Nye County, Nev.
The two chambers must now meet in a conference committee to reconcile their differing spending proposals into a unified bill for President Trump to sign. That meeting was not scheduled at deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor, though the House GOP has appointed some pro-Yucca conferees.
Widely reported Capitol Hill gossip and on-the-record-insinuation chalked up failure of the Trump administration’s first effort to restart the DOE license application before the NRC — halted in 2010 by the Barack Obama administration — to political considerations. Those considerations remain in force this year.
With midterm elections approaching in November, Republicans cling to a 51-49 majority in the Senate. One of those 51 GOPers is Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), the only sitting senator defending a seat in a state Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 general election.
While Congress has flashed some bicameral and bipartisan support for Yucca Mountain this year, having Heller vote on a spending bill that included Yucca Mountain funding would still force the senior senator from the Silver State to either oppose his own party’s budget and potentially become culpable in a partial government shutdown, or buck many of his constituents and agree to fund Yucca Mountain.
So, just like the 2018 spending bill produced by the upper chamber, this year’s Senate DOE budget bill included no mention of Yucca Mountain.
That is even after Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), principal architect of the Senate’s DOE budget, said in an April appropriations hearing that Yucca “can and should” be part of the government’s solution for dealing with more than 75,000 metric tons of nuclear waste of which it is legally obligated to dispose.
In separate statements this week that eschewed the details of how they accomplished the feat, Sens. Heller and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) each took credit for keeping Yucca Mountain funds out of the Senate’s 2019 DOE budget. Neither Senator’s office immediately replied to requests for comment on their roles in the matter.
Heller in particular has made opposition to Yucca a cornerstone of his re-election campaign, in which he faces off against Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who is looking to trade her House seat for a perch in the upper chamber. The senator has said that he and he alone can prevent his colleagues from funding Yucca over Nevada’s objections.
In a statement of administration policy released this week, the Trump administration criticized the Senate for zeroing out Yucca Mountain in its 2019 budget bill, but commended the body for including funds for a privately operated interim-storage pilot.
The Senate bill would, if signed into law, direct DOE to start work on a pilot program for licensing, construction, and operation of at least one interim storage site for radioactive waste. Spent fuel now stranded at power plants could be consolidated at such a site before being moved to a permanent repository such as Yucca.
New Jersey-based Holtec, and a separate partnership of Waste Control Specialists and Orano, are each seeking NRC licenses to interim storage sites. Holtec wants to build a storage site in Lea County, N.M., to store about 100,000 metric tons of fuel. The Waste Control Specialists-Orano partnership wants to build a 40,000 metric-ton facility in West Texas.
Senators this week approved an $898 million salaries-and-expenses budget for the NRC, plus $12.6 million more for the agency’s Inspector General’s Office. House lawmakers signed off on $953 million for NRC operations and $12.6 million for the IG. The key difference was the Senate’s rejection of nearly $48 million the NRC requested for Yucca Mountain licensing activities, which the House supported in full.
The House offered $150 million for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), $30 million more than the Senate. The program that remediates and maintains former locations of Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission operations.
Both chambers of Congress met the $3.6 million ask for the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an 11-member panel of experts for the Department of Energy.
Amendment approved last week for the Senate bill would provide $15 million for a material recovery demonstration project on recycling spent nuclear fuel for use in advanced nuclear reactors, and $20 million to promote domestic production of the medical isotope molybdenum-99.
