Three U.S. representatives from Nevada on Monday filed an amendment that would strip funding for Yucca Mountain out of an Energy Department budget bill set for a floor vote in the House of Representatives this week.
Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D), whose 4th District includes Yucca Mountain, filed the amendment along with Reps. Jacky Rosen (D) and Dina Titus (D). The amendment would delete $90 million in spending the House Appropriations Committee approved for DOE to restart its application to license Yucca Mountain as a permanent disposal site for civilian and defense nuclear waste.
The trio also filed a second amendment that would strike a provision of the bill that forbids DOE from doing anything that might “that irrevocably remove the possibility that Yucca Mountain may be a repository option in the future.”
Alone among Nevada’s House delegation, Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) did not cosponsor either amendment. Amodei, Nevada’s sole GOP representative, opposes turning Yucca into a waste repository, but has called for DOE to make the mountain into a “bastion of nuclear research and reprocessing.”
The House Rules Committee was set to consider the rules of debate for the spending bill at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. At that time, no one had proposed an amendment that would remove the $30 million the Donald Trump administration requested for 2018 so the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could prepare to process DOE’s Yucca license application.
Likewise, no one had filed an amendment that would remove the $30 million the House Appropriations Committee approved for DOE to begin preparing high-level nuclear waste from nuclear weapons projects for permanent disposal. An amendment from Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), though, would add $10 million in additional funding for nuclear waste disposal.
Congress designated Yucca Mountain as a nuclear-waste disposal site in 1987 in an amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Nevada and its the vast majority of its elected officials at all levels of government have opposed the project ever since.
The House is set Wednesday to begin debate on the Make America Secure Appropriations Act of 2018. The bill combines four spending bills already approved by the House Appropriations Committee into a so-called “minibus” package. Besides the roughly $38-billion Energy and Water budget, the measure includes 2018 spending proposals for the Defense Department, the Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs.
Fiscal year 2018 begins Oct. 1.
