By John Stang
Officials from Nevada sent mixed signals this week to the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee regarding upcoming legislation intended to kick-start the stalled nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain.
On Tuesday, nine of Nevada’s 17 counties indicated support for the legislation in a letter to committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wy.), the bill’s sponsor, and Ranking Member Tom Carper (D-Del.).
However, Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen (both D-Nev.) sent the exact opposite message in testifying Wednesday on the discussion draft of the not-yet-filed bill.
Barrasso’s Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019, which is largely identical to 2017 legislation from Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) that died in the Senate, contains a set of measures to advance both temporary storage of the nation’s nuclear waste in a small number of locations and the final repository in Nevada.
The George W. Bush adminstration Department of Energy filed its license for the Yucca Mountain site in 2008 with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but the Obama administration froze the proceeding two years later. Congress has already rejected two requests by the Trump administration to provide funding to resume licensing. The White House is trying again for the upcoming 2020 federal budget year; House and Senate Appropriations committees have not yet said whether they will meet the request.
“Funding for the license process has been denied for nine years on purely political grounds. The overwhelming body of scientific studies done on the proposed repository have demonstrated that it can be built and operated safely,” Nye Countym Nev., Commissioner Leo Blundo wrote in the letter to Barrasso and Carper, saying he was representing the commission and eight other nearby counties.
Counties near the Yucca Mountain site, in Nye County about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, have anticipated potential economic development and employment from the project.
Nevada’s state and federal elected leaders, though, see only negatives – potential damage to the regional environment and harm to the state’s crucial tourism industry.
“For over 30 years, many in Congress have been trying to force a repository facility on Nevada, despite the fact that Nevada does not generate or consume nuclear energy, and that Yucca Mountain is a seismically and geologically unfit site to store this dangerous material,” Cortez Masto told the committee. “A vast majority of Nevadans opposed Yucca Mountain when the site was selected as the nation’s sole repository back in 1987, and they continue to do so today.”
The Energy Department is already more than two decades past the Jan. 31, 1998, deadline set by Congress in 1982 to begin disposing of spent reactor fuel from commercial power reactors and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations. That material, now somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 metric tons, remains spread across the nation.
The federal government has already spent at least $15 billion on research and development of the Yucca site – with little to show, as Cortez Masto noted, beyond a 5-mile underground tunnel at the site. Meanwhile, the DOE liability to nuclear power operators continues to grow – the federal government is paying roughly $800 million each year in taxpayer money to companies stuck with the used fuel, Tim O’Connor, chief nuclear officer of Xcel Energy, testified Wednesday.
Barrasso said a series of Energy Department scientific studies dating to 1982 have determined that the Yucca Mountain site is safe for geologic disposal and that the DOE design would meet regulatory standards. Congress followed the process it set in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act in designating the federal property as the disposal site, Barrasso said, including overruling Nevada’s formal objection to the selection.
Still, passage of the bill would allow for resumption of the NRC licensing process, in which the state of Nevada and other opponents could present their scientific case against the project, he said in his opening statement. Nevada has already filed more than 200 technical and legal contentions in the NRC proceeding, and has more ready to go should it resume.
“We can’t start over and let another 40 years pass to solve this challenge,” according to Barrasso. “The discussion draft before us today is a solution.”
Measures in his legislation include: authorizing the secretary of energy to enter into an agreement with a private entity for siting, construction, and operation of one or more “monitored retrievable storage” facility for nuclear waste; permanently withdrawing 147,000 acres of federal land in Nye County, Nev., for the Yucca project and transferring authority from the Interior Department to the Energy Department; and requiring the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consider construction authorization for the repository within 30 months after the bill is enacted.
The intra-Nevada debate over the correct approach for managing the nation’s nuclear waste was reflected in debate among senators on the committee and other witnesses.
“I believe that one of the biggest mistakes that we made in Congress … was not obtaining the consent from all parties on the location of disposal,” Carper said in his opening statement to the hearing. “Somehow we’ve learned how to get communities across the nation to compete for the siting of prisons in our nation, but we’ve not yet learned how to incent the communities to compete for disposal of our nuclear spent fuel.”
There was no indication at Wednesday’s hearing on when the bill would be filed, and a committee spokesperson did not respond to a query by deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor. A spokesman for Shimkus has said the legislation will also be filed in the House, but did not specify a schedule.
Its future in both chambers is an open question. The Senate in recent years has focused on funding interim storage over Yucca Mountain as the fastest means of moving nuclear waste from its point of generation. The House has been more amenable to the Nevada repository, overwhelmingly approving Shimkus’ Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act in 2018. However, Democrats retook the majority in the November midterms and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reportedly opposes the Yucca Mountain plan.
There are a number of other nuclear waste management bills waiting in the Senate. Just this week, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) filed the third iteration of their Nuclear Waste Administration Act. Their legislation aims to establish a consent-based approach to consolidated storage and eventual disposal of nuclear waste, starting with creating a new federal organization to oversee the process.
In March, Cortez Masto and Rosen, along with members of Nevada’s delegation to the House, introduced legislation that would require consent from impacted states, municipalities, and Native American tribes for construction of a nuclear waste repository.
The Nevada senators made clear at Wednesday’s hearing the state will continue to fight the Yucca Mountain repository. The project will need a state water permit to become operational, Cortez Masto said: “We will never issue one.”
