The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy would get roughly the $1.6 billion the White House requested for it in fiscal year 2024, if a bill approved this week by the Senate Appropriations Committee becomes law.
The full committee approved the bill 29-0 on Thursday, setting up both a floor vote in the full Senate, not scheduled as of deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor, and a confrontation with House appropriators who in June passed a bill with a different vision for the office.
In a detailed report accompanying their bill, Senators said DOE “is directed to move forward under existing authority to identify a site for a Federal interim storage facility,” the report says.
Under the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act, DOE may not build an interim storage site until it builds a permanent repository for spent fuel, akin to the moribund Yucca Mountain project, but “a wide variety of activities that may take place prior to the limitation in that act,” Senate appropriators wrote in their report.
House Appropriators, on the other hand, were largely silent about spent nuclear fuel in their version of DOE’s annual budget bill. The House committee even recommended cutting the Nuclear Energy office’s Integrated Waste Management System subprogram to $18 million from the requested $53 million.
Aside from helming DOE’s effort to find an interim storage site, Integrated Waste Management System includes development of spent-fuel handling technology. The Senate bill released Thursday would meet the White House’s request for the subprogram.
U.S. power plants had generated about 86 metric tons of spent fuel as of 2020, according to a DOE-sponsored report.
Altogether, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended about $1.56 billion for the Office of Nuclear Energy. That’s about in line with the request and the 2023 budget, but roughly $230 million less than the nearly $1.8 billion House appropriators recommended for the office.
The Senate committee did not go along with their House counterparts’ plan to pile far more money than requested into Nuclear Energy’s advanced reactor and advanced fuels accounts. Those proposed increases on the House side account for nearly all of the differences in the two spending bills.
Also, the House appropriations bill, written by the chamber’s Republican majority, would roll back federal spending to 2022 levels. That was a political non-starter in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where lawmakers want to spend at the higher level agreed to in the deficit deal that House Republicans and President Joe Biden (D) in early June.
