The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee on Monday approved a roughly $36-billion fiscal 2019 Department of Energy budget bill, which heads to the full committee for a markup Wednesday.
The Energy Department would receive a 5-percent budget raise from 2018, if the bill the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee marked up becomes law. Overall, the proposed budget is about 20 percent more than the White House sought in a 2019 budget request that was released before Congress lifted spending caps on federal agencies including DOE.
The subcommittee had not released a bill report at deadline Friday. The report, which provides a more detailed look at proposed funding for individual sites and programs, will be published a day before the full appropriations committee marks up the bill, a committee aide said Monday by email.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management would get about $6.9 billion for its portfolio of Cold War nuclear weapons cleanup programs. That is about 3 1/2 percent less than the 2018 appropriation, but roughly 4 percent more than the White House requested for the Environmental Management office for the budget year starting Oct. 1.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would get $15.3 billion: about 4 1/2 percent more than the 2018 appropriation and 1 1/2 percent above the 2019 request. The bill forbids NNSA from canceling the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., unless the agency can prove an alternative costs no more than half what it would take to finish the program of record. The facility is designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms-control pact with Russia.
Meanwhile, the bill provides nearly $270 million between the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to resume efforts to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear waste repository. The bill meets the White House’s request for the commission’s part of the work, about $48 million, but nearly doubles the $120 million the Donald Trump administration sought for DOE’s share of the work in 2019.
“Funding above the budget request will be used to accelerate progress toward meeting the federal government’s legal obligation to take responsibility for storing the nation’s nuclear waste,” the subcommittee wrote in a summary of its bill released Sunday.
Yucca Mountain still faces stiff opposition in the Senate, where lawmakers ignored the administration’s request to restart licensing last year, and Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) has again pledged to block funding for the effort during the upper chamber’s annual appropriations process.
