Government officials across the political spectrum must shoulder the blame for failure to establish a permanent solution to the United States’ nuclear waste quandary, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Tuesday.
“This is a failing of both Republicans, Democrats, Independents, all lumped together, that nuclear waste has set idle in 120 sites in 39 states for decades, with all the potential for disaster that could happen, with no permanent repository for it to be safely disposed,” Perry said during a keynote address to the Energy Information Administration’s 2017 Energy Conference in Washington, D.C. “And on my watch I intend to change that. Working together to find a solution to those challenges.”
Perry did not discuss details during his speech, but the Trump administration has focused on resuming licensing of the planned Yucca Mountain geologic repository in Nevada, which Congress three decades ago designated as the storage site for U.S. spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
The Obama administration canceled work on Yucca Mountain, but it has new life under the Trump administration. The Department of Energy budget plan for fiscal 2018 would provide $110 million for licensing of Yucca Mountain and $10 million to advance interim storage facilities until the permanent repository is ready. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would receive $30 million for Yucca licensing operations.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is scheduled this morning to mark up legislation from Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) that would ease obstacles to building the repository in Nevada. In a commentary published Monday in the East Oregonian newspaper, committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 will expedite progress on Yucca Mountain to help free facilities such as DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state of their nuclear waste legacies.
