In mid-August, with his former colleagues enjoying a week of recess back home, a self-described “nuclear-waste guy” with nearly a quarter of a century on Capitol Hill worked on lesson plans for his new teaching gig, watching nuclear-waste history repeat itself.
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) ended a 24-year career representing Illinois’s 15th congressional district in January. During that run, Shimkus distinguished himself as one of the very few lawmakers willing to spend his hard-accrued political capital on nuclear-waste-policy reform.
“I’m still probably fairly well known as the elected official who’s the subject matter expert on nuclear waste,” Shimkus told RadWaste Monitor during a brief interview August 18.
Nowadays, Shimkus is hoping to mold the next generation of public servants as a part-time professor in Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s political science department. Fall 2021 is his inaugural semester.
Of course, like a lot of folks who have retired from public life, he’s also looking to leverage his policy expertise outside of government. Now a principal at the St. Louis-based lobbying and consulting firm Kit Bond Strategies (KBS), Shimkus will have plenty of opportunities to continue participating in the nuclear-energy debate.
One of KBS’ biggest client in 2020 was the Ameren Corporation, a Missouri-based energy holding company that owns Callaway Nuclear Generating Station near Fulton, Mo.
In the final years of his congressional career, Shimkus shot for the moon, spearheading the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2018: a 51-page tome of nuclear waste reform that passed the House by a wide margin only to sputter and die in the Senate, where Nevada politics, national politics and legislative inertia combined to bring down the bill without much of a fight.
Still, Shimkus’s bill was the closest any legislator has gotten in more than a decade to changing the letter of the nation’s nuke waste law, and it remains as a template, should any lawmaker be moved to start rolling that boulder up the Hill again.
From his new perch on the sidelines, Shimkus had plenty to say last week about the latest national nuclear waste debate, which has a few new wrinkles, and the state of civilian nuclear power generally.
The latter issue has become raw lately for proponents of nuclear power in Illinois. On Aug. 4, Exelon announced in a conference call with investors that it would close the state’s financially-troubled Byron and Dresden nuclear power plants in the fall. The company blamed its decision on the state government’s failure to come forward with a relief package in time to save the embattled plants.
But Shimkus, who spoke to the Monitor in the weeks after Exelon’s long-awaited decision, doesn’t hear the death knell for his home-state plants just yet.
“My guess is the state will come through and try to prop those up, have them continue to operate,” Shimkus said, “but they’re going to have to do it quickly.”
Having Byron and Dresden operational will be important for the country to get to zero emissions, Shimkus said.
The Illinois state legislature is currently mulling an energy bill that would subsidize the struggling nuclear plants, although it hasn’t yet reached Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s (D) desk.
While the new Joe Biden administration hasn’t specifically weighed in on the Illinois reactors, the bipartisan infrastructure bill does have a financial lifeline for struggling nuclear power plants, and the importance of nuclear energy is touted broadly in Washington still, including by central figures such as Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVa.), chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Of course, even financially untroubled nuclear reactors still need a place to ship their spent fuel, so Shimkus, between classes, will have to keep an eye on the prevailing nuclear waste discussions of the day.
With Nevada’s Yucca Mountain no closer to being built now than it was during Shimkus’ decades in Congress, the hot topic today is private consolidated storage of spent nuclear fuel: a market opportunity that condensed into reality while the federal government largely dragged its feet.
Holtec International and Interim Storage Partners (ISP) have both applied with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build commercial interim storage sites. NRC is close to a licensing decision for ISP’s proposed Texas site, and the agency has said it will make a final call on Holtec’s site in New Mexico by January.
Holtec and ISP won’t be allowed to start their proposed interim storage projects without a fight from the proposed host communities, though. The argument du jour from the hosts is that licensing these facilities constitutes a violation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), which they say precludes NRC from giving the green light to either company until a permanent waste repository is established. New Mexico attorney general Hector Balderas is most prominently making that claim in his ongoing suit against NRC, which the agency is trying to get kicked out of court.
Shimkus doesn’t think New Mexico’s case will cut any ice in court.
“It’s just not accurate,” Shimkus said. “The Nuclear Waste Policy Act does not prohibit private interim sites, nor does it prohibit the NRC from licensing those private sites.”
NRC agrees with that interpretation. In an August 16 court filing, the agency told Balderas that it has authority to license private interim storage under the Atomic Energy Act, not the NWPA.
“If you look at [the NWPA], there’s no there there,” Shimkus said. “You go to court when you’re harmed, but your litigation has to be based upon law.”
Although the NWPA may not prove to be much of a legal obstacle for commercial interim storage, it does prevent DOE from taking title to any nuclear waste until there’s a permanent repository. Since none exists, the agency pays utility companies for the burden of storing spent fuel on site at their power plants. So if that waste gets shipped to a private interim storage site, it’s unclear whether DOE would still be on the hook for those payments.
“I think that, until the federal government grabs title, payments will be made to utilities to hold the waste [at an interim storage site],” Shimkus said. DOE’s money, he posited, will in turn be paid out to whichever private company is hosting the spent fuel.
“That’s really all of Holtec’s business model,” Shimkus said. “[T]he question is, when is the federal government ever going to take title?”
