Amid her campaign for a second term, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) on Tuesday filed a bill that would if enacted remove Yucca Mountain’s designation as a nuclear waste repository.
The bill would also terminate the not-quite-dead Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding that the George W. Bush (R) administration started with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Barack Obama (D) administration defunded and discontinued.
The designation and the licensing have each endured well beyond the apparent political death of Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel from nuclear power plants.
Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.) joined Rosen as a co-sponsor of the Jobs Not Waste Act, the text of which had not been published as of Wednesday morning. Rosen described some of the bill’s features in a press release published Tuesday on her website.
Nevada’s mostly-Democratic congressional delegation often files bills to roll back the law, still on the books, designating Yucca Mountain as the only legal site for a permanent nuclear-waste repository.
The bills usually go nowhere in Congress.
The delegation’s latest proposal, Rosen said in her press release, was in part a reaction to some House Republicans’ recent public support for Yucca Mountain. The Jobs Not Waste Act also goes a step further than previous proposals to kill Yucca by attempting to aid a Nevada state effort to shut down the mountain’s license proceedings at the NRC.
Opposition to Yucca Mountain is near universal among Nevada politicians. Rosen in 2018 defeated incumbent Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.). Each campaign proclaimed its opposition to licensing Yucca.
In statements to media, one of Rosen’s challengers this cycle, Republican Sam Brown, has not foreclosed future support for Yucca licensing, though he has also said he is “not committed” to opening the site.
After the publication of recorded remarks from 2022 in which Brown seemed to wonder whether Nevada should accept Yucca before another state offered to host a repository, Brown’s campaign has been the target of repeated attacks by Democrats in the state and even some of his challengers for the Republican nomination to oppose Rosen, media reported. The Los Angeles Times first reported on the recorded remarks.
Brown’s campaign did not respond to an email this month from the Exchange Monitor asking if the candidate supported the licensing of Yucca Mountain as a deep geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel.
