The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not resume consideration of the Energy Department’s application to license Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear waste repository, despite media reports to the contrary sparked by a routine notice published in the federal register this week.
The notice that appeared Wednesday in the federal government’s official journal is essentially a form letter NRC is required to publish every three years because of an arcane federal law known as the paperwork reduction act. The 1995 law requires agencies to get approval from the White House Office of Management and Budget before collecting information from the public.
“It’s a routine extension of a clearance,” an NRC spokesman told RadWaste Monitor. “We have to issue this every three years. It has nothing to do with restarting the licensing review.”
In this case, NRC was seeking continued approval of its plans to ask state and tribal stakeholders in Nevada how the commission could accommodate their participation in hypothetical future discussions about Yucca Mountain — including a hypothetical resumption of DOE’s application to license the mountain with NRC as a permanent waste repository.
Hypothetical, that is, because despite the Donald Trump administration’s plans for DOE to restart its Yucca Mountain license application, DOE has not yet done so.
The administration has proposed spending a combined $150 million in fiscal year 2018 for DOE and NRC to restart the licensing process the Barack Obama administration stopped in 2010, but that funding is part of a budget proposal Congress must write into law — and lawmakers have not yet held so much as a hearing on next year’s proposed energy budget.
After news reports claiming DOE was restarting the Yucca licensing process started trickling out late Tuesday, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) issued a statement slamming the Trump administration for a move it hadn’t yet made.
A press release posted to Markey’s website Tuesday said the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts “today criticized the decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to begin the process to restart the Yucca Mountain licensing process.”
“Restarting the licensing process for Yucca Mountain would reach new heights of scientific irresponsibility,” Markey said in the statement. “The Obama administration was right to stop the licensing process for Yucca Mountain, whose selection was based more on political science than on real science.”
With only about a month of congressional work days left, give or take, until the 2018 fiscal year begins, a former DOE official who was the agency’s point man on Yucca early in the early George W. Bush years wondered if the Trump administration’s larger legislative agenda might become an obstacle for Yucca in the U.S. Senate this summer.
The House, where the GOP majority is friendly to Yucca and members have already approved a healthcare bill Trump is pushing, probably will approve 2018 appropriations language that includes at least the administration’s full request for the mountain, Lake Barrett, the former head of DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste, wrote in an email to RadWaste Monitor.
But in the Senate, where every member is a king or queen, things may be different.
Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) “has many more important issues to deal with [than Yucca],” Barrett wrote. “Close Senate Health Care votes, for example, where a single Senator, such as Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) can trade for local favors that are way beyond what one might normally expect.”
With Harry Reid retired, Heller has become the de facto leader of the Nevada delegation’s unwavering opposition to Yucca Mountain. The state’s senior U.S. Senator has not missed an opportunity this year to clash with the White House over the Trump administration’s plans to get Yucca Mountain back on track.
“We will just have to wait and see,” Barrett said.
