Officials from Nevada sent mixed signals this week to the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee regarding 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 (Del.).
However, Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen (both D-Nev.) sent the exact opposite message during a committee hearing 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 Department of Energy filed its license for the Yucca Mountain site in 2008 with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later. Congress has already rejected two requests by the Trump administration to provide funding to resume licensing.
“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 County Commissioner Leo Blundo said in the letter to Barrasso and Carper, saying he was representing the commission and eight other nearby counties.
Counties near the Yucca Mountain site, 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.
“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 said in testifying before 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.”
