Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Tuesday affirmed his belief that the planned site for a nuclear waste repository under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain is safe, even given its proximity to an Air Force munitions test range.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) pressed Perry on the issue during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Energy Department’s fiscal 2020 budget request.
“Even former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson has stated that transportation of nuclear waste near the range could impact testing and training,” Cortez Masto said. “Do you think it is safe to store waste nearby even with the threat that errant ordnance or any other mishap near Yucca Mountain could have an extremely negative impact on the public?”
Perry responded, “I think it’s safe, senator.”
For the budget year that begins Oct. 1, the Energy Department has requested $116 million to resume licensing of the Yucca Mountain repository and establish a “robust” program for interim storage of nuclear waste until the final disposal site is ready. The department submitted its license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008, but it has languished for nearly a decade after the Obama administration defunded the proceeding.
With approval from Capitol Hill, the NRC would get $38.5 million in fiscal 2020 to restart adjudication of the DOE license application. The state of Nevada, where state and federal elected leaders remain firmly opposed to the site, estimates the process could take four to five years.
Congress has already rejected the Trump administration’s fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2019 requests for funding at DOE and the NRC to restart licensing. While there have been early inklings that the situation could change in the upcoming budget, lawmakers won’t tip their hands until the House and Senate roll out their initial energy and water appropriations bills. There was no word this week on when that will happen.
The Nevada Test and Training Range covers 2.9 million acres on Nellis Air Force Base, available for training with various live munitions. Yucca Mountain stands next to the Air Force base.
Cortez Masto also called attention to a March 21 letter to Perry from Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board Chairman Bruce Hamilton, raising concerns that DOE has not sufficiently considered potential seismic dangers to the Nevada National Security Site’s Device Assembly Facility. The former Nevada Test Site is about 40 miles north of Yucca Mountain.
As of late 2018, the Device Assembly Facility holds half a metric ton of plutonium shipped from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, another point of tension between Nevada and the Department of Energy.
“My question to you, is have you taken these seismic hazard reports into consideration as you continue to push to open Yucca Mountain?” Cortez Masto asked.
“I feel quite certain that we would, senator,” Perry answered, but under further questioning appeared to acknowledge that the analysis might not yet have been conducted.
Nevada is among the most seismically active states in the nation, one of the points made by state leaders in their environmental, safety, and economic case to prove Yucca Mountain’s unsuitability for disposal of nuclear waste.
Proponents say the isolated location about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas has been found safe — a point raised by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), a longtime supporter of the Yucca Mountain approach, in an April 3 letter to Cortez Masto. The NRC safety evaluation report on the project, completed in January 2015 with input from specialists in seismology, hydrology, structural geology, engineering, and other areas of relevant expertise, “‘determined that the proposed repository design complies with the performance objectives and requirements that apply after the repository is permanently closed,'” he wrote.
As he did in budget hearings on Capitol Hill last week, Perry on Tuesday noted that federal law requires that the nation’s radioactive waste repository be built under Yucca Mountain. He said comments President Donald Trump made in October in Nevada, suggesting his administration would look at alternatives to waste disposal in Nevada, are outweighed by that law.
“I’m going to follow the law and I think the president’s going to follow the law. His opinion on whether or not the people of Nevada like it or not doesn’t have anything to do with what the statute says,” Perry said.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act called for two repositories, with the sites picked through a winnowing process over several years. However, Congress in 1987 amended the law so that Yucca Mountain remained the only candidate and plans for the second repository were terminated.
Cortez Masto said the amended law constituted an intentional “end run” around sound science to ensure that Nevada was the only state to ultimately be stuck with tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear power reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations.
“Historical context is key and it shows that extreme political influence was used to scapegoat the state of Nevada,” Nevada’s senior senator said.
Shimkus this week urged Cortez Masto to support allowing the license adjudication to proceed before the NRC’s quasi-judicial Atomic Safety and Licensing.
“Because I and the majority of our colleagues in Congress want the extensive scientific evidence compiled by DOE and NRC in support of proceeding with the Yucca Mountain repository to be fully evaluated, I have always supported the state of Nevada’s right to question that science,” according to his letter, first reported by the Nevada Independent. “That’s why I continue to urge our House and Senate colleagues to give your state the opportunity to do so before an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, which is composed of administrative law judges who are also trained engineers and scientists.”
Cortez Masto’s office this week did not respond to repeated queries on the issue.
Multiple Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel boards, each with three members, were adjudicating roughly 300 legal and technical contentions against Yucca Mountain construction at the time the proceeding was suspended on Sept. 30, 2011. New boards would resume work if the process receives funding from Congress.
Nevada Lawmakers Call on House Appropriators to Block Yucca Mountain, Plutonium Shipments
Separately, Democratic members of Nevada’s congressional delegation on Monday called on key House appropriators to prevent the federal government from moving forward with the Yucca Mountain repository or shipping any more plutonium to the state.
Nevada’s leaders have for decades fought the U.S. government’s effort to make their state home to the nation’s radioactive waste. The legal and legislative battle over the surplus plutonium is far more recent.
Reps. Dina Titus, Susie Lee, and Steven Horsford (all D-Nev.) on Monday sent letters to House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee Chair Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and Ranking Member Mike Simpson (R-Idaho). The letters “advocate for the inclusion of specific language in the subcommittee’s upcoming FY 2020 appropriations bill that would prevent the federal government from moving forward with storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and block further shipments of plutonium from South Carolina to the Nevada National Security Site,” according to a press release from Titus.
The energy and water subcommittee writes the House’s first draft of the appropriations bill covering the DOE and the NRC. The Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration is managing shipment of 1 metric ton of plutonium from Savannah River to the Nevada National Security Site and Pantex Plant in Texas.
Representatives for Kaptur and Simpson this week did not respond to requests for comment on the state of the appropriations bill. However, during a budget hearing last week, Simpson thanked Perry for again requesting funding for Yucca Mountain.
