Senate appropriators this week approved a roughly $1.7-billion budget for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, more than requested but less than what House appropriators recommended.
The fiscal year 2025 budget, approved unanimously on Thursday by the Senate Appropriations committee as part of a larger Energy and Water appropriations act, is down $10 million, or less than 1%, compared with the 2024 appropriation, more than $84 million above the 2025 request and $118 million below what House appropriators want to spend in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
Most of the Senate committee’s disagreements with their House counterparts was in the budget lines for Reactor Concepts RD&D, Advanced Fuels and Front End Fuel Cycle: areas that broadly focus on future technology for new nuclear power plants. The committee proposed the requested funding, or close to it, for all three accounts.
Also unlike their House colleagues, Senate appropriators recommended meeting the request of $52 million for the Nuclear Energy office’s Integrated Waste Management System subprogram, where DOE funds the consent-based siting effort to find a storage facility for consolidating spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants.
The House Appropriations committee recommended cutting the waste management account by more than half.
Neither the House nor the Senate have votes scheduled for August. The chambers still have to approve their respective appropriations bills and had no votes scheduled as of deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor. The 2025 fiscal year begins Oct. 1 and lawmakers will not be back in town until after Labor Day.
As in 2024, the committee told the Nuclear Energy office to use its “existing authority to identify a site for a Federal interim storage facility” for spent nuclear fuel. DOE in May announced it had started early concept work for a federal interim storage facility that could be built by 2040.
Meanwhile, in the detailed report accompanying the Senate committee’s bill, lawmakers also directed DOE to:
- “[S]upport the commercialization activities associated with laser enrichment technology in furtherance of expanding U.S. supply of HALEU,” high assay low enriched uranium.
- Spend $10 million on “industry- led, commercial-scale, competitive, cost-shared research projects” for spent fuel recycling, production of feedstock for mixed-oxide and HALEU fuel for nuclear reactors and “recovery of critical isotopes from [spent nuclear fuel] for use in medicine, industry or defense.”
- Work with the Arctic Energy Office to help facilitate deployment of a Department of Defense microreactor.
