WASHINGTON — Sometimes wielded as a cudgel at home to discourage investment in new nuclear power, U.S. struggles with radioactive waste seldom reach the ear of one of the country’s biggest international power brokers
“Interestingly enough, when I talk about nuclear energy with people from other countries, they almost never talk about this issue,” said Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “They never come to me and say ‘hey, what are you going to do about your nuclear waste?’ I never get that from foreign countries.”
Risch, also a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, spoke here during the Nuclear Energy Security Summit co-hosted by the Exchange Monitor and the UCANN Power group, a Washington-based interest group that promotes advanced nuclear reactors.
Risch this year is a cosponsor of far-ranging, bipartisan legislation, introduced by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WV.a.), to reform nuclear policy in the U.S. Originally a standalone bill called the ADVANCE act, the legislation was folded into a version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act that passed the Senate with 86 votes in July.
The House still must approve the Senate’s language for it to become law, and the chamber is beset with challenges, with the Republican majority fighting amongst itself on larger issues of federal spending and Democrats so far unified against negotiating across the aisle.
Still, no bill in recent years has made it as far in the Senate as the Capito-authored legislation that Risch and many of his colleagues have sponsored.
The legislation includes nuts-and-bolts policymaking, such as extending liability caps for the nuclear industry and expanding radioactive waste reporting requirements for the Department of Energy, but it also has plenty of provisions designed to encourage the development, deployment and even export of advanced nuclear reactors.
Those provisions rankled one of Risch’s colleagues on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee as much as they delighted most of the others.
“I understand this legislation is important to many members of the committee but we should not give a boost to the nuclear industry without commensurately confronting the longstanding issues of how to deal with nuclear waste and nuclear decommissioning,” Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), a longtime critic of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, said in May during a speech to the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
There was a virtual echo of Markey’s comments a month later during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce energy, climate and grid reliability subcommittee.
Without a “long term strategy to deal with the spent fuel…I frankly don’t see a way that nuclear energy will become a significant part of our clean energy future,” Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Co.) said during the hearing.
Other Democrats at that House hearing seconded the sentiment.
“We Americans wring our hands over it all the time,” Risch said here Thursday. “We built this great, big, $5-billion hole in Nevada and now won’t use it,” Risch said, referring to the unfinished deep-underground repository for high level waste and spent fuel at Yucca Mountain. “But I can tell you, they [foreign nations] don’t poke me, they don’t ask about it.”
