The fiscal 2018 omnibus spending bill that passed Congress this week provided no funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, but it also did not incorporate language from a Senate appropriations package that some in industry dubbed a “Yucca-mountain position pull.”
The House of Representatives passed the $1.3 trillion spending measure Thursday, followed the Senate in the early hours of Friday morning. At deadline Friday afternoon for RadWaste Monitor, President Donald Trump said early Friday afternoon he would sign the omnibus, after earlier threatening to veto the bill.
The omnibus includes some $1.2 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (ONE): a little less than a 20-percent increase from the 2017 appropriation for the agency branch in charge of nuclear waste operations. However, Congress did not provide the $120 million the Donald Trump administration sought to merge various offices within ONE into a single Yucca Mountain and Interim Storage program.
At the same time, the report appended to the omnibus would give DOE essentially free rein to spend some $22.5 million — flat, compared with the 2017 appropriation — on interim storage and nuclear-waste transportation studies that could conceivably be relevant to Yucca.
The Energy Department is looking for the means to meet its mandate under the 1982 to dispose of the nation’s growing stockpile of high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors.
The DOE research funding is nested in ONE’s Integrated Waste Management System, which the White House wanted to fold into the proposed Yucca Mountain program. Notably, the omnibus report does not require DOE to spend this appropriation to study a pilot interim-storage project with an industry partner, or resume the Barack Obama administration’s consent-based siting program for nuclear waste storage: directions that were part of a draft 2018 spending bill the Senate Appropriations Committee approved last summer, before budget negotiations collapsed.
Consent-based siting was the Obama White House’s effort to find locations for interim storage and permanent disposal of nuclear waste after the administration stopped funding DOE’s application to license Yucca Mountain with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2010. To date, no state has given its consent, and the Trump administration DOE has said it is reassessing the consent-based approach.
Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who has sworn Yucca Mountain will never happen, was quick to take credit this week for keeping the planned repository out of the omnibus.
“I worked to ensure that funding to revive the Yucca Mountain project was excluded from this spending bill, and I’m pleased that Nevada’s message was heard,” Heller wrote in a statement posted to his website. “While this is a positive development, my work to stop Yucca Mountain is far from over. That is why I will continue to tell Washington, D.C. that Nevada will not turn into the nation’s nuclear waste dump.”
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also did not receive any of $30 million in Yucca licensing funding the Trump administration requested for the independent nuclear-waste regulator in 2018 as part of a roughly $940-million budget ask.
The commission would, if it is ever funded to so do, conduct the quasi-judicial license adjudication in which DOE would have to rebut hundreds of technical contention Nevada raised with the agency’s Yucca license application. At the end of the process — again, if it ever is resumed — DOE might get the go ahead to actually build the underground repository.
The Energy Department filed its Yucca license application in 2008, and it is still docketed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The current budget year ends on Sept. 30. For fiscal 2019, the Trump administration has requested $120 million at DOE and $47.7 million at the NRC for Yucca licensing activities. During a budget hearing last week, Heller told Energy Secretary Rick Perry the Senate would never sign off on funding for the repository.
Perry also got an earful about the aging application in a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, when Heller’s colleague, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), questioned the fitness of all things Yucca. Cortez Masto hit Perry with questions about whether DOE’s now-decade-old license application was still fit for consideration by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and whether the agency had a plan to procure tons of titanium for the repository — even though Congress has yet to fund the project.
“Why should Congress agree to appropriate any funds without answers to any of these questions?” Cortez Masto asked Perry.
“These dollars are for the licensing side that the NRC’s working on, and for our operational side of it, just to cover the cost of that,” Perry said. “It’s not to be looking at the structural issues.”
On Monday, Cortez Masto sent the DOE chief a letter asking, among other things, whether the agency has spent $10 million in carryover funding — appropriations left over from a prior year — to work on its Yucca license. And, if so, how much. During Tuesday’s hearing, the lawmaker asked Perry to respond to the letter within two weeks. Perry said he would give “as timely a response as possible.”
