Members of Nevada’s congressional delegation offered a quick message to the Trump administration’s newly selected successor to Secretary of Energy Rick Perry: Stop trying to bring nuclear waste into the state, and quickly remove the plutonium shipped last year.
Perry announced on Oct. 17 that he would resign after more than two-and-a-half years as head of the Department of Energy. His departure, scheduled for Dec. 1, did not draw any well wishing from Nevada lawmakers.
“Good,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) wrote in a one-word farewell last week as he tweeted a Politico article about the former Texas governor’s resignation from the Cabinet.
In his own tweet on the matter, President Donald Trump said on Oct. 18 he would nominate Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette to the top job at DOE. Brouillette had not been formally nominated as of deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor.
“No matter who this Administration puts forth to lead the Department of Energy, the next Energy Secretary must from day one work hard to restore Nevadans’ trust that DOE has lost through recent actions,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) said in a statement Wednesday to RadWaste Monitor. “That includes honoring our state’s opposition to dumping the nation’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and working to remove the weapons-grade plutonium from Nevada that was shipped to our state without consent.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) issued a similar message on Oct. 18, noting she had voted against Brouillette’s confirmation as DOE deputy in August 2017 and saying she aims to meet with him to discuss issues of importance to her constituents.
Nevada has spent decades fighting the federal government’s plans to build a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Its concerns range from harm to the state’s tourism industry to fears that an earthquake in the seismically active region might enable the release of radiation. Advocates for Yucca Mountain say $15 billion in research and development spending has shown the selected site to be safe.
More than three decades ago, Congress formally designated the patch of federal land as the eventual site for disposal of what is now roughly 100,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors. The Department of Energy filed its construction and operations license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008, during the George W. Bush administration. However, the Obama administration defunded licensing two years later, eventually embarking on a “consent-based” approach for siting nuclear waste disposal that was still in the planning stage when Trump was elected.
By that time the state of Nevada had filed more than 200 technical contentions against NRC licensing of the repository, along with several lawsuits aimed at killing the project. Its leaders at the state and federal level have been vocally displeased by the Trump DOE’s three successive budget requests for money to resume licensing. Congress shot down the proposals for fiscal 2018 and 2018, and both chambers have already zeroed out the latest Yucca Mountain request in their fiscal 2020 spending packages. However, Congress has not yet passed a full budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, instead keeping the government running on a stopgap spending measure that expires Nov. 21.
Both Perry and Brouillette have characterized their support for Yucca Mountain as adherence to federal law – specifically the amended version of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act that put the Energy Department in charge of disposal of the nation’s nuclear waste. That 1987 amendment directed that the material be interred under Yucca Mountain.
Brouillette, at his confirmation hearing in May 2017, said he is “in favor of following the law” on radioactive waste disposal.
“If the science is so definitive as to show that the site is unsafe, I don’t think it’s in the interest of anyone to place nuclear waste and endanger the lives of Americans anywhere,” he said during a question-and-answer with Cortez Masto. But he added that “if the science were to show that it is safe, we would be obligated to follow the law.”
Eventually, both Cortez Masto and then-Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) voted against Brouillette’s confirmation in August 2017. Both had supported Perry’s nomination in March 2017.
Neither Cortez Masto nor Rosen, who defeated Heller in the November 2018 midterm elections, responded to queries this week regarding how they intend to vote on Brouillette’s nomination as energy secretary.
His confirmation would first go through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she would organize a hearing as soon as the nomination is official.
The tense relationship between the Energy Department and Nevada state government was further strained when the agency acknowledged in January that it had last year transported half a metric ton of plutonium to its Nevada National Nuclear Site. That came in response to a federal lawsuit from Nevada aimed at stopping the shipment, which was the result of a separate lawsuit filed by South Carolina to force the material out of that state.
In April, Perry committed in writing to Cortez Masto that DOE would remove the plutonium from 2021 to 2026. The plutonium would be sent to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, to be converted into fissile cores for nuclear warheads.
For Nevada, the Energy Department could help repair the state-federal relationship by starting plutonium removal in 2020.
Brouillette has been Perry’s deputy secretary for just over two years. When Trump first nominated him, a source said the longtime insurance lobbyist — Brouillette spent more than a decade leading Washington operations for the United Services Automobile Association of San Antonio, Texas — had been hand-picked by Perry to serve as the DOE No. 2.
Brouillette has spent much of his career in industry, where he arrived after about four years in government service, where he focused heavily on Congress. In 2004, Brouillette left his position as staff director for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which sets policy for most branches of the Energy Department, but not the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
From 2001 to 2003, Brouillette was assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental affairs in the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Energy, serving as the agency’s principal liaison to other parts of the executive branch and Congress.
Perry has not outlined his future plans, but said he will return to Texas. He said his resignation is not linked to increasing scrunity from the House of Representatives for his role in U.S. relations with Ukraine as it considers impeaching President Donald Trump, according to ABC News and other outlets.
Nevada Policy
Meanwhile, the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects could vote next month on a report updating its policy recommendations to state leaders on nuclear waste management.
The seven-member panel has since the 1980s been advising Nevada’s governor and legislature on radioactive waste disposal and overseeing the state Agency for Nuclear Projects. The policy reports are generally issued every two years.
At the top of the latest policy positions is, unsurprisingly, the permanent termination of the Yucca Mountain project.
The report, being prepared by the Agency for Nuclear Projects, also calls for passage of the House and Senate versions of the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, respectively filed by Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) and Cortez Masto in March. The bills, currently in committee, would require state, local, and tribal approval for siting any waste repository that impacts them.
Alternately, Murkowski’s Nuclear Waste Administration Act should be amended to feature such language, the draft report says.
The Murkowski bill features a set of measures intended to advance efforts to establish temporary storage and permanent disposal of nuclear waste. It already includes language mandating state, local, and tribal consent for any new radioactive waste site, but does not apply that directly to Yucca Mountain. Cortez Masto and Rosen are believed to be pressing to add that language to Murkowski’s legislation, but did not respond to queries on the matter this week.
The commission report, if approved at its Nov. 8 meeting, would support another aim of the Murkowski legislation: forming a new federal organization that would assume management of nuclear waste planning.
The Murkowski bill is an updated version of legislation she backed in two previous Congresses alongside lawmakers including Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). It was filed in April and referred to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The panel held a hearing on the bill in June but has not scheduled a vote.
