The federal government must be allowed to resume the long-delayed licensing for a nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Thursday.
In testimony on Capitol Hill, Perry suggested he is not committed solely to one disposal location, but rather to finally ending a decades-long impasse on finding a permanent home for tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste now spread across the nation.
“I’m not a ‘Yucca Mountain or bust’ person. Let’s find a solution to this. Yucca is one of the solutions. But if you do not have a permitting process that is finalized you’re never going to be able to move this out of your states,” Perry told the members of the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee during a hearing on the Department of Energy’s proposed $31.7 billion budget for fiscal 2020.
Both Perry and members of the panel affirmed that the Energy Department has a legal responsibility, under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, to build a permanent disposal site for spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from federal defense nuclear operations.
The United States has already paid $8 billion to nuclear power companies for failing to begin taking their spent nuclear fuel by the Jan. 31, 1998, deadline sent under the law, Perry noted. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act was amended in 1987 to specify Yucca Mountain as the end site.
The Trump administration for the federal budget year beginning Oct. 1 is requesting $116 million for DOE’s Yucca Mountain licensing and interim storage program. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would receive $38.5 million to resume its review of the Energy Department license application filed in 2008.
The Obama administration in 2010 defunded licensing for the proposed national repository some 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Following the advice of a panel of experts, the Obama DOE sought to initiate an approach under which local and state consent would be required for siting pilot and interim storage sites and then separate repositories for defense and commercial waste. That plan did not get far before President Donald Trump was elected and refocused on licensing Yucca Mountain.
However, Congress has already rejected White House requests for funding in fiscal 2018 and 2019 for licensing activities at DOE and the NRC.
House and Senate appropriators have not yet issued their fiscal 2020 spending proposals for the two agencies, so far offering little hint of how they will respond to the administration’s latest request for Yucca Mountain funding. In the last two years, the House has backed resumption of licensing while the Senate has put forward appropriations for interim storage of nuclear waste, with neither approach getting any money in the final enegy spending bills.
Meanwhile, Democrats took over the House this year, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reportedly opposes the Yucca Mountain plan.
In his opening statement to the hearing, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) emphasized the need for consolidated interim storage of spent fuel until the Energy Department’s repository is ready. “I hope to work with you and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to give the department the authority it needs to store the spent fuel at interim storage sites until we can permanently dispose of it.”
Two corporate teams have applied for NRC licenses to build interim storage sites in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. They hope to begin operations early in the 2020s.
Nonetheless, “Yucca Mountain is the law of the land,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) noted near the end of the Thursday’s hearing.
Perry said he believes Americans want a permanent repository. That is preferable to the “plan right now,” which involves keeping spent fuel in above-ground storage on-site at active and retired nuclear power plants, he said. That is costing the federal government $2 million daily in liability payments to nuclear companies.
“We can’t get an answer on whether Yucca is the right place or some other place is a proper disposal site unless we have the permitting process going forward,” he said.
The state of Nevada has made clear that it opposes resumption of licensing, which it says could take upward of five years to complete. It has already filed more than 200 technical and legal contentions against the DOE application, and says it will file more if the proceeding begins again.
Separately, Perry said he supports the concept of state governments keeping commercial reactors financially afloat.
Perry was responding to a question from Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) regarding options for keeping nuclear plants going in the face of economic challenges including energy produced by lower-cost natural gas. The hearing came one day after power company Exelon committed to closing its reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania by Sept. 30.
“I think it would behoove the states that have nuclear plants to look at whether or not they want to at the state level subsidize those plants. I don’t necessarily thing the word subsidy is a bad term,” Perry said.
Illinois, New York, and other states have established financial assistance for their nuclear power plants, most frequently through credit programs for zero-emission energy sources. Those programs have persuaded Exelon to keep some of its plants alive, but financial assistance measures in the Pennsylvania legislature gained no traction in the 2019 session and Exelon is procceding to shutter Three Mile Island Unit 1.
The Energy Department has made efforts to establish bailout programs for coal and nuclear plants, but has not been able to enact them. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission blocked one proposal last year.
“It’s beyond the ability of lots of states to do as you are suggesting,” Doyle said. “Your responsibility as the secretary of the Department of Energy is for our national energy portfolio,” 25 percent of which comes from nuclear plants.
