Lawmakers from Nevada this week reintroduced two pieces of legislation intended to make it much more difficult, if not outright impossible, for the federal government to build a nuclear waste repository in their state.
The bills dropped just days before the White House is due to roll out its budget request for fiscal 2020. Issue observers have said they expect the Trump administration to take a third swing at resuming the licensing process for the planned disposal site under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
Meanwhile, strongly pro-Yucca Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) appears to be teeing up an updated version of his Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, which was voted out of the House last year but died in the Senate.
Each of the Nevada delegation’s bills this week were filed in the House and Senate. They are refreshed versions of legislation that got little traction in prior years.
The “Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act,” filed Tuesday, would require the Department of Energy to obtain consent from state, local, and tribal governments before building a nuclear waste repository in a given state. The “Jobs, Not Waste Act,” filed Thursday, would require a White House Office of Management and Budget study of possible alternative uses for the Yucca site, roughly 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, before the Department of Energy proceeds with the repository.
Congress in 1982 demanded that the Department of Energy by Jan. 31, 1998, begin accepting of tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations for disposal. Five years later, it directed that Yucca Mountain be the only location considered for the national repository. Nevada state leaders and lawmakers have from Day 1 opposed being forced to accept other states’ nuclear waste.
“Every year, Nevadans are forced to deal with attempts by Washington to force nuclear waste into their backyards. We have been clear that Yucca Mountain is not only unsafe and scientifically unsound, but it’s a total waste of $19 billion taxpayer dollars,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) tweeted on Thursday.
Cortez Masto joined Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) to file the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act in the upper chamber, while Reps. Dina Titus, Steven Horsford, and Susie Lee (all D-Nev.) sponsored the House version of the legislation.
If passed by Congress, the bill would require the secretary of energy to secure several levels of approval before spending money from the federal Nuclear Waste Fund for developing, building, and operating a repository, along with transport and other waste management operations. Consent would be required from: the governor of the state in which it would be built; all impacted local government bodies; any local government contiguous to those impacted bodies, if they would be on the transport route for spent nuclear fuel or high-level radioactive waste; and all impacted Indian tribes.
While communities near Yucca Mountain have been more open to the economic benefits of the disposal project, support largely ends there. Opposition to the project crosses political boundaries in the state.
Consent would require a written agreement, signed by all participating entities, under the bill. The agreement would be binding on all parties and could not be updated without full consensus.
The Senate bill was sent to the Environment and Public Works Committee, while the House measure went to the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Titus and then-Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) introduced the same bill during the 115th Congress. Neither measure got out of committee before that Congress ended on Jan. 3. Titus and then-Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had also pressed the consent measure in the 114th Congress, to the same end. Titus last May also unsuccessfully sought to add consent language to Shimkus’ nuclear waste bill ahead of its House vote.
Cortez Masto and Rosen also introduced the Jobs, Not Waste Act in the Senate, while it was sponsored in the House by Horsford and Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.). The bills were sent to the same committees that received the nuclear waste consent legislation.
If the bill passes, there could be no licensing, preparation, or construction of the Yucca repository until Congress receives the OMB study of alternative uses and holds a hearing on the topic. Among the potential uses for the federal property, according to the bill: defense operations such as a command site for military drones; scientific research; a secure electronic data center; or renewable energy development.
In 2018, Rosen sponsored the same bill while she was in the House, before defeating Heller in the November midterm elections. It got no further than the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Death by committee has been the fate of most nuclear waste-related bills in recent Congresses. Shimkus’ Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act was something of an exception: Filed in June 2017, it collected 109 co-sponsors on its way to advancing out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that month by a 49-4 vote and then out of the full House last May by a 340-72 vote.
The bill contained a set of measures intended to promote both Yucca Mountain and a program for interim storage of spent fuel until the final repository is ready. The bill, among other proposals, would have put the Department of Energy in charge of managing the federal property and authorized the energy secretary to study agreements for one or more “monitored retrievable storage facilities.” However, it never received a hearing, much less a vote, in the Senate.
Bloomberg BNA reported this week, though, that Shimkus plans to resurrect the bill. To do so, he’ll need support from Democrats who retook control of the House in the midterms.
Asked about the status of the bill, before and after the Bloomberg article, a Shimkus spokesman said “Stay tuned.”
The Trump administration has found it similarly hard to make any progress on Yucca Mountain.
The Department of Energy license application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been frozen for the better part of a decade after the Obama administration defunded the proceeding. The two agencies for fiscal 2018 together requested nearly $150 million for nuclear waste management activities, nearly all of it for Yucca licensing. They upped that to $170 million for the current fiscal 2019. While the House supported both requests, the Senate did not and won the day in negotiations for final budgets for DOE and the NRC.
The White House is doing a two-part rollout of the fiscal 2020 budget plan, on March 11 and March 18. The release is about a month late due to the partial shutdown of the federal government from Dec. 22 to Jan. 25.
While the White House, DOE, and the NRC have not said whether they will again propose funding for Yucca Mountain, such an approach is anticipated.
They might get more help than usual in the Senate. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who chairs the Senate Appropriations energy and water committee that writes the chamber’s first draft of the funding bill for the agencies, has said he supports advancing both Yucca Mountain and interim storage. In prior years, his panel has focused on funding for interim storage.
