There was no word this week on when the three nominees to fill out the Nuclear Regulatory Commission might get confirmation votes from the U.S. Senate.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Oct. 25 sent the Trump administration’s Sept. 5 nomination of sitting Commissioner Jeff Baran for a floor vote by the full chamber. That was more than three months after two earlier Trump administration nominees, Annie Caputo and David Wright, got the thumbs-up from the panel.
The Senate on Tuesday debated and then voted 62-37 to approve Kirstjen Nielsen’s nomination as homeland security secretary, following John Kelly’s move to become White House chief of staff.
“After that we might have another announcement. But right now I do not have any guidance,” David Popp, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said prior to the vote on Nielsen.
On Thursday, Popp indicated that no guidance would come before the Senate approved a continuing resolution to keep funding the federal government. Both chambers of Congress approved the CR through Dec. 22 later that day, but has yet to approve a full budget for the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
Representatives for the top two lawmakers on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Ranking Member Tom Carper (D-Del.), said this week they also had no details regarding the schedule for confirmation votes, including whether they would happen this year.
Caputo, a nuclear engineer and policy adviser to Barrasso, and Wright, an energy consultant and former president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, are solid Republican picks for the commission. Carper had demanded that their nominations be paired with that of Baran, a former Democrat staffer on Capitol Hill who has served on the commission since October 2014.
The other current members of the commission are Chairman Kristine Svinicki, who the Senate earlier this year approved for a new term to June 30, 2022; and Stephen Burns, whose terms ends June 30, 2019.
NRC Spends $14K From Nuclear Waste Fund in October
Separately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in October spent $14,707 from its remaining available balance of the Nuclear Waste Fund, according to the agency’s latest update to Congress.
That left the regulator with $527,408 in unspent, unobligated funds from the account intended to pay for development of a permanent repository for U.S. high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
The Obama administration in 2010 halted work on the planned Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, but a federal court three years later ordered the NRC to proceed with the process of licensing the Department of Energy facility. The NRC as of October had spent more than $12.9 million of the $13.5 million it had available at the time of the August 2013 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
More than $8 million was spent on completion of a safety evaluation report on Yucca Mountain, along with nearly $1.6 million for a supplement to the environmental impact statement on the site and $1.1 million to load the License Support Network into the NRC’s online ADAMS document database.
The majority of October spending was split between two projects: $6,019 on knowledge management reports, which provide technical information to assist in the Yucca licensing review; and $6,524 on planning a virtual meeting of the Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel (LSNARP) and information collection regarding potential license application adjudicatory hearing venues.
In its fiscal 2018 budget proposal, the NRC requested $30 million from the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for Yucca Mountain licensing review activities, per the Trump administration’s intention to revive the project. The House has backed the request, while Senate appropriators have yet to approve any Yucca Mountain money for the NRC or DOE. The budget year began Oct. 1, and the federal government is running on a continuing resolution that includes no money for the repository.
The NRC’s total remaining balance fund balance of $591,082 as of the end of October encompassed $63,674 in money that had been committed, largely for contracts with the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses and for the LSNARP virtual meeting.
