Energy Secretary Rick Perry raised eyebrows this week by listing facilities in Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas as possible interim storage sites for U.S. nuclear waste, then a day later clarified that his agency has made no decisions on any potential locations.
In successive budget hearings before House and Senate Appropriations committees, though, Perry left no doubt that the Trump administration’s Department of Energy plans to follow the “rule of law” and move forward with Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the permanent geologic repository for that waste.
That had Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) fuming in a Thursday hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where she ripped Perry for what she painted as an epic flip-flop on Yucca Mountain. In his confirmation hearing in January before the same committee, Perry took pains to paint himself as states-rights man.
Since then, “you went from touting the importance of state sovereignty to a full-throated support for depositing the nation’s waste in Nevada against the will of my state, undermining a state’s right to defend itself against dangerous nuclear waste,” Cortez Masto told the former Texas governor.
Perry said he disagreed with the Cortez Masto’s “analysis of my position,” and pointed out that the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act directed DOE to site and build a final resting place for tens of thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste and spent commercial reactor fuel now stored around the country. Congress in 1987 mandated that the waste be buried beneath Yucca Mountain.
Progress has been halting in the years since, with the Obama administration stopping and the Trump administration reviving licensing for the Nevada facility.
The Department of Energy’s budget proposal for fiscal 2018 would provide $110 million for Yucca licensing, along with $10 million to advance a “robust” program of interim storage.
Perry during the week repeatedly raised the specter of the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in emphasizing the need for moving spent fuel from nuclear power plants to safe, consolidated storage. “There is statutory requirements for us to move this waste,” he said Thursday. “I don’t think it’s wise for us to continue to leave high-level waste, spent rods, in pools.”
The DOE secretary also found himself in hot water this week after remarks, since clarified, about possible interim storage sites in New Mexico, Nevada and Texas.
At a Tuesday budget hearing before the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, Perry mentioned three potential interim storage locations: DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico; the department’s Nevada National Security Site; and the privately operated Waste Control Specialists storage complex in West Texas.
Officials from Nevada, already gearing up to battle the suddenly resurgent Yucca plan, quickly lashed out, calling Perry’s comments “irresponsible,” “a total blindside,” and other unfriendly terms.
Those outcries prompted Perry to walk back his comments Wednesday and Thursday during hearings before the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
“While there are a number of options that we’ve talked about on how to deal with these issues, no decisions have been made at this time with respect to the timing, or location for that matter, of waste storage,” Perry told Senate appropriators Wednesday.
Opposition from Nevada would not be the only obstacle for selecting any of these locations.
The 1992 legislation that established WIPP, where DOE stores its transuranic waste, explicitly prohibits disposal of high-level waste and spent fuel at the underground storage mine.
Waste Control Specialists last year filed for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for interim storage of nuclear waste, but in April asked that the NRC suspend its review of the application pending the company’s buyout by EnergySolutions. On Wednesday, a federal judge blocked the merger on antitrust grounds, raising new questions about the company’s plans.
Perry said Wednesday that any plans for interim storage in the three states he mentioned would have to be coordinated with Congress and relevant local, state, and federal agencies. “Yesterday what I was attempting to do was convey my interest in working with Congress to bring resolution to this issue, and that’s all I was saying,” he said.
While lawmakers from both parties were frosty to the overall DOE budget plan, which features a 5.6 percent spending reduction, to $28 billion, there was no quibbling about paying to address the nuclear waste dilemma. While declaring his support for Yucca Mountain, Senate subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said communities now stuck with spent fuel cannot wait for the repository to be built.
“[T]he quickest and probably least expensive way for the federal government to start to meet its used nuclear fuels obligations is for the Department of Energy to contract with a private storage facility for used nuclear fuel,” he told Perry.
In this week’s budget hearings, committee members sought to make sure Perry understood the many complexities surrounding both interim and permanent storage of nuclear waste – not the least being political. House subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) noted that his panel had included funding for developing the Yucca repository in several recent budgets, only to see it stripped out in conference. While both chambers of Congress generally support temporary and final means of storage, the House has demanded that Yucca advance alongside the shorter-term solution, while the Senate has been more amenable to delinking them.
“Yucca holds everything hostage,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, said during Wednesday’s hearing. “In the House if you don’t do Yucca you get nothing.”
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act also explicitly prohibits construction of an interim facility until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has licensed a permanent repository.
Appearing skeptical that Congress can approve a new budget by the beginning of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1, Simpson asked whether DOE has funds available until the spending plan becomes law to stand up the office that will oversee work on Yucca Mountain – presumably some reconstituted version of DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which the Obama administration disbanded when it abandoned the project. Perry replied that funds are available and that the department intends to establish the office, but did not provide further detail.
The next day, in an extended back and forth with Alexander, Perry indicated he supports using Yucca Mountain as a permanent waste repository, considers private consolidated interim storage to be viable, believes such a facility likely could be opened sooner than the permanent repository, and agrees that work on one option should continue even if the other stalls.
Perry, though, was not ready to sign off on the assertion from his predecessor, Ernest Moniz, that DOE already has authority to contract with a private company for storage of nuclear fuel.
“That requires statutory interpretation, clarification if you will, And I think the more explicit Congress can be about our authority … I think the clearer that authority will be,” he told Alexander.
Alongside Waste Control Specialists, New Jersey-based Holtec International has also applied for an NRC license for an interim facility in southeastern New Mexico with capacity for 120,000 metric tons of spent fuel.
Both leaders of the Senate subcommittee emphasized the need for additional storage beyond Yucca Mountain, which they noted has a legal capacity that is already lower than the amount of spent fuel waiting to be put into permanent storage – 70,000 tons versus 77,000 tons, and growing.
Alexander said he, Feinstein, and other senators plan to refile legislation this year that would establish an agency to find additional temporary and permanent repositories for spent fuel. The lawmaker added that he and Feinstein would also send a letter to Perry requesting clarity on schedules for operations of four different avenues for waste storage: Yucca Mountain, a private consolidated interim storage facility, an interim storage site included in appropriations bills, or expansion of WIPP.
Meanwhile, a House subcommittee last week advanced the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 to that chamber’s full Energy and Commerce Committee for consideration. The bill, sponsored by Yucca Mountain evangelist Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), would weaken Nevada’s ability to block the proposed nuclear waste repository and would also prevent DOE from starting work on interim storage sites until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decides Yucca’s fate.
Experts estimate the commission would make a decision between two and five years after DOE resumes the Yucca Mountain license application with NRC that the Obama administration canceled in 2010. The Trump administration wants to resume the license application some time after Sept. 30, but Congress must still approve funding for that purpose.
