A conservative policy document written in part by former advisors to former President Donald Trump (R) recommends restarting federal licensing for the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level waste repository in Nye County, Nev.
The 900-plus-page Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership also said the Department of Energy should find a site for a second high-level waste repository and increase “the level of private-sector responsibility for the disposal of nuclear waste” from civilian power plants.
Trump himself while in office swung from attempting to restart Yucca to opposing it personally in 2020 during his unsuccessful reelection campaign. Project 2025’s authors said licensing the facility with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not mean the facility would be built.
“Yucca Mountain remains a viable option for waste management, and [the Department of Energy] should recommit to working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as it reviews DOE’s permit application for a repository,” the Project 2025 report reads. “Finishing the review does not mean that Yucca Mountain will be completed and operational; it merely presents all the information for the State of Nevada, Congress, the nuclear industry, and the Administration to use as the basis for informed decisions.”
Congress defunded DOE’s Yucca licensing effort in 2010 at the request of the Barack Obama (D) administration, which bowed to pressure from the Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), then the majority leader. Reid was Yucca Mountain’s most politically powerful opponent.
After putting Yucca on ice, the Obama administration began what it called a consent-based siting process, which was supposed to find a willing coalition of local, tribal and state governments to volunteer as a host community for a permanent deep-geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel.
Project 2025 did not call for canceling DOE’s consent-based siting project, but said the effort has been “a way to delay any politically painful decisions about siting a permanent civilian nuclear waste facility.”
“The next Administration should use the consent-based-siting process to identify and build temporary or permanent sites for a civilian waste nuclear repository (or repositories),” the report said.
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court, citing doctrine endorsed by a Supreme Court whose supermajority of conservative justices was mostly appointed by Trump, has effectively struck down commercial interim storage of nuclear waste.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which believes it can license such activity, has appealed the ruling all the way back to the Supreme Court, an independent branch of the federal government. The case was pending as of deadline or RadWaste Monitor.
