The nearly $50 million the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requested for fiscal 2019 could be enough to restart the quasi-judicial, and long-moribund, adjudication on licensing Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear waste repository, the head of the commission wrote in a letter to Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.).
NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki supplied that tidbit in a letter dated March 20 and posted online Wednesday. It was not clear from the NRC’s latest budget request, released in February, whether the $47.7 million requested for Yucca was enough to actually fund licensing procedures, or merely intended to prepare for their resumption.
It might be a moot point, however, since Congress has shown no sign it is ready to give either the Department of Energy or the NRC the funding these agencies need to, respectively, file and judge an application to license Yucca for waste disposal.
The 2018 omnibus budget signed last week provided none of the funding DOE and the NRC sought for Yucca. The mountain was a political nonstarter in the Senate last year, where Heller — up for re-election as Senate Republicans cling to a razor-thin 51-seat majority — has promised to fight it at every turn. Politically, nothing about that situation will change much before the 2019 fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
Svinicki’s letter was a reply to a letter Nevada’s senior senator and Yucca-buster-in-chief sent the commission on March 12. In that missive, Heller asked whether the NRC had revised a 3 year-old estimate that it could cost $330 million to resume and complete the Yucca licensing adjudication the Obama administration halted in 2010.
In her March 20 note, Svinicki said the process might cost more than $330 million. Experts estimate it would take between two and five years for DOE to get a definitive decision on its Yucca License application, once — and if — the adjudication begins.
