The Nevada Senate this week approved a joint resolution that would make official the state Legislature’s opposition to the Energy Department’s proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository.
The measure, Assembly Joint Resolution 10, passed 19-2. The Nevada General Assembly approved the measure by a 32-6 vote in in March, with four lawmakers absent. The resolution now will become the official position of the Nevada Legislature and will be sent to the U.S. Congress in Washington.
Voting “no” on the measure this week were Nevada state Sens. Pete Goicoechea (R-19), who represents Yucca’s host community of Nye County, and and Sen. Donald Gustavson (R-14) who represents an adjacent county. The resolution calls on Energy Secretary Rick Perry “to abandon consideration of Yucca Mountain as a repository site.”
The joint resolution did not require Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval’s (R) signature to become the official position of the Legislature. Sandoval, along with Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt, both oppose Yucca Mountain, as does substantially every elected official in the state.
The Barack Obama administration in 2010 canceled DOE’s application to license Yucca Mountain with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In March, the Donald Trump administration proposed spending $120 million in fiscal 2018 to restart the application, and to lay groundwork for an interim waste-storage program to consolidate more than 75,000 metric tons of waste sitting at power plants across the country before sending it on to Yucca.
Nevada, as it has in the past, has vowed to fight DOE every step of the way on Yucca and has filed more than 200 technical contentions with the agency’s license. Those claims will take somewhere between two and five years to litigate before the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, according to a range of estimates published by pro- and anti-Yucca experts.
