WASHINGTON — The head House appropriator for the Department of Energy still does not see much hope for any funding for the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the 2018 spending bill that could be published Monday.
The energy portion of the 2018 omnibus the House and Senate are negotiating behind the scenes “has not come out yet, so I am not allowed to talk about our budget,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, told reporters after a budget hearing with Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
However, Simpson did say congressional leaders “hope to put it [the bill] online” Monday. If approved, the omnibus would provide funding for the government for the remainder of this fiscal year.
Simpson lamented, as he did last week, the lack of progress on Yucca Mountain in a Republican administration with a GOP-controlled Congress.
The White House requested about $150 million for Yucca Mountain in fiscal 2018, which began on Oct. 1, and about $170 million for 2019. The Department of Energy (DOE) would get most of that money in both years: $120 million. The funding would help the agency prepare to resume its application to license Yucca as a permanent waste repository with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The NRC will conduct the quasi-legal Yucca license adjudication that is sure to include years of arguments against the project, led by Nevada officials who oppose importing tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste from other states. The White House requested $30 million in Yucca funding for the NRC in 2018, and raised the ask to almost $50 million for 2019.
The House approved all requested Yucca funding for 2018, while Senate appropriators provided no money for the project in their energy bill, which never got a floor vote. The series of short-term budgets that have kept the federal government running ahead of the anticipated omnibus also included nothing for Yucca Mountain.
Widely reported Capitol Hill gossip holds that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would not permit Yucca funding to come to a vote in the upper chamber while Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) — who opposes the project — is up for re-election this year. A vote might put Heller in the politically difficult position of holding up the whole federal budget to stop Yucca.
The lack of action on Yucca is “political more than it’s anything else,” Simpson said here Thursday. “So, you know: I think during the ‘019 budget, it’ll either be resolved or it won’t.”
Meanwhile, new budget documents released this week show DOE is sticking to the plan it made last year to centralize management of its Yucca efforts in a new Yucca Mountain and Interim Storage program. The program would be helmed by 83 people in Washington and Las Vegas, with the Washington office accounting for just over half the program’s payroll, according to DOE’s budget justification for its Office of Nuclear Energy.
The $120 million DOE requested for the program would mostly be spent at agency sites across the country, with the 83 employees in Washington and Vegas handling legal issues and administration.
DOE sites that would get a piece of Yucca funding in 2019 are:
- Nevada Field Office, just over $40 million.
- Sandia National Laboratories, about $35.5 million.
- Washington Headquarters, about $35 million.
- Idaho Operations Office, about $3 million.
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory, just over $1 million.
- Savannah River Operations Office, roughly $1 million.
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, $910,000.
- Los Alamos National Laboratory, $840,000.
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, $840,000.
- Argonne National Laboratory, $800,000.
- Idaho National Laboratory, $10,000.
The Energy Department first proposed the Yucca Mountain and Interim Storage program in its 2018 budget request, after the Donald Trump administration reversed the Barack Obama administration’s decision to halt the Yucca licensing process. As in the 2018 request, the program would be mostly about Yucca, which would get $110 million of the $120 million requested for nuclear waste storage overall.
For more than 30 years, DOE has been trying to consolidate what is now more than 75,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants. The department is required to build and operate a permanent repository under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
