Members of Nevada’s delegation to Congress on Tuesday reintroduced legislation that 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 lawmakers left no doubt that their primary intent is to prevent DOE from building the repository at Yucca Mountain against the wishes of leaders in Nevada.
Sens. Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto (both D-Nev.) introduced the “Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act” in the Senate, while Reps. Dina Titus, Steven Horsford, and Susie Lee (all D-Nev.) sponsored the House version of the legislation.
“It is past time for the federal government to accept that Nevadans reject this Administration’s proposal to move forward with turning our state into the nation’s repository for nuclear waste,” Rosen said in a joint press release.
If passed by Congress, the legislation would require the secretary of energy to secure several levels of approval before spending money from the Nuclear Waste Fund for developing, building, and operating a repository, along with transport and other waste management opeations. 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.
Consent would require a written agreement, signed by all participating entities. The agreement would be binding on all parties and could not be updated without full consensus.
Titus and then-Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) introduced the same bill during the 115th Congress. Neither measure got out of committee. Titus last May also unsuccessfully sought to add consent language to Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act. The House passed the Shimkus bill, but it never got a vote in the Senate before the last Congress ended.
