William Cooper, the Trump administration’s nominee to become Energy Department general counsel, was passed out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on a voice vote Thursday afternoon.
The vote came after the panel’s business meeting was postponed Thursday morning, a committee staffer said. The nominee will now await action by the full Senate.
During his confirmation hearing before the same panel on Aug. 16, Cooper said the Department of Energy should follow the law on establishing a nuclear waste repository below Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) asked how Cooper would approach the long-planned disposal site in her home state. Cooper said DOE should “follow the statutory mandates on Yucca Mountain.”
The lawyer’s comments were in line with those of his prospective boss, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who has said the federal government must follow the “rule of law” when it comes to disposal of radioactive waste.
In a 1987 amendment to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the final home for the U.S. stockpile of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear reactor fuel. Progress since then has been halting, and the site has yet to be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Trump administration has sought funding to resume the licensing effort suspended nearly a decade ago by its predecessor; while the House has supported reviving the Nevada project, the Senate has consistently zeroed out all appropriations for Yucca Mountain.
The Nevada senator also asked Cooper if DOE would support consent-based siting for a nuclear waste repository. That would depend on specifics of legislation coming out of Congress, he replied. This was a follow-up question after Cortez Masto asked Cooper’s opinion on the findings of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. The nominee said he wasn’t familiar with details of the commission’s January 2012 report.
In its final document, the expert panel recommended a “new, consent-based approach to siting future nuclear waste management facilities” under which communities would be encouraged, and given incentives, to volunteer to host such a site.
The Obama administration initiated a consent-based approach, but its time in office ended before it could be fully realized. The Trump administration has turned back toward Yucca Mountain. A placeholding message has remained in place for well over a year on the DOE web page for consent-based siting: “Thank you for your interest in this topic. We are currently updating our website to reflect the Department’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Perry.”
Cooper also pledged support for the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement, between DOE, the state, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that governs cleanup at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
“I think the department should honor its commitments in the agreement,” Cooper said in response to a question from committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). “It’s important for the department to reach out to all stakeholders to get their input on any decisions” regarding management of radioactive tank waste and other issues at Hanford.
Missed DOE cleanup milestones have caused the Tri-Party Agreement to be revised many times over the years, Cantwell said.
For example, for more than a decade the Energy Department has been studying a move from wet-to-dry storage for more than 1,900 capsules of cesium and strontium removed from Hanford waste storage tanks in the 1970s and 1980s.
Cooper is a corporate lawyer and former staffer on Capitol Hill, where he served as staff director for the House Natural Resources mineral resources subcommittee and general counsel to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. His most recent position has been as senior counsel and director in the Washington, D.C. branch of McConnell Valdés, a corporate law firm based in Puerto Rico.
The original Trump administration nominee for general counsel, David Jonas, a former attorney with DOE and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, withdrew in January. A veteran Energy Department official, Ted Garrish, the agency’s assistant secretary for international affairs, is serving as general counsel on an acting basis.
