Senate appropriators on Wednesday did not forbid the Department of Energy from turning Yucca Mountain in Nevada into a permanent nuclear waste repository, but they also did not promise to give the agency funding for the project in fiscal 2019.
As it did last year, the department has requested $120 million for paper and preparatory work on a license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that would, if approved, allow DOE to build the nation’s first permanent repository for civilian and defense radioactive waste.
In 2017, the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee shot the idea down in its first DOE budget hearing of the year. At the time, the panel wanted DOE to reinstate the Obama administration’s consent-based policy for disposal of nuclear waste, which would effectively have taken Yucca off the table.
At a hearing Wednesday on the latest DOE budget plan, the subcommittee kept Yucca on the table, but did not say whether it would fund DOE’s application to license the mountain as a waste facility.
“I strongly believe that Yucca Mountain can and should be part of the solution to the nuclear waste stalemate,” subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said in prepared remarks. “Federal law designates Yucca Mountain as the nation’s repository for used nuclear fuel, and the Commission’s own scientists have told us that we can safely store nuclear waste there for up to one million years.”
Also as he did last year, Alexander urged Energy Secretary Rick Perry — one of three DOE witnesses at the hearing — to steer some of the spent nuclear fuel now sitting at power plants to privately operated interim storage facilities.
There are no such facilities at the moment, but Holtec International wants to build one in southeastern New Mexico. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled public meetings about Holtec’s proposal for late April and early May. Meanwhile, Orano and Waste Control Specialists plan to restart the latter’s license application for a spent-fuel storate site in West Texas.
