By John Stang
The Senate appears set to vote Monday on its version of a fiscal 2019 “minibus” appropriations bill that merges three funding measures covering the Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a number of other agencies.
The upper chamber of Congress closed up shop for the week on Thursday, but not before scheduling a vote on the legislation at 5:30 p.m. Monday.
Senators spent much of the week advancing the version of the minibus forwarded from the House to provide funding for energy and water, the legislative branch, and military construction and veterans affairs. But late in Thursday’s floor session they approved an amendment that swapped in the Senate Appropriations Committee’s version of the energy and water development spending bill.
That legislation would provide $898 million for salaries and expenses at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, plus another $12.6 million for the agency’s Inspector General’s Office. The House version offers $953 million for NRC operations and also $12.6 million for the IG. In its February proposal for the budget year starting Oct. 1, the agency asked for $958 million and $12.6 million for those respective operations.
The primary difference in the congressional funding levels is that Senate appropriators dismissed the NRC’s nearly $48 million request for funding to resume licensing of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, which the House has fully met. In total, the House would spread about $270 million across DOE and the NRC for Yucca licensing, while the Senate so far is giving them nothing.
The Senate bill would provide $120 million for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). That matches the Trump administration request, but is $30 million below the amount offered by the House for the program that remediates and maintains former locations of Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission operations.
Both Appropriations committees supported the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board’s request for $3.6 million. The 11-member board of scientists and engineers provides expert review of Department of Energy nuclear waste management operations.
Amendments added Wednesday to the Senate bill would provide $35 million more to U.S. programs for production of a key medical isotope and recovery of usable nuclear fuel from spent fuel.
Senators voted 87-9 in favor of an amendment from Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) to add $15 million for a material recovery demonstration project on recycling spent nuclear fuel for use in advanced nuclear reactors.
Reactors that power U.S. naval vessels could produce up to 100,000 tons of used fuel, which the Department of Energy projects could cost roughly $100 billion to dispose of, Crapo said Wednesday morning on the Senate floor.
“However, advanced nuclear reactors have the potential to reuse this spent nuclear fuel and to reduce the overall disposal cost,” he said.
The demonstration project at the Idaho National Laboratory would blend high-enriched uranium fuel so it can be used in advanced nuclear reactor startup cores, according to Crapo’s office. Those cores require a fuel known as high-assay low-enriched uranium, enriched to less than 20 percent of fissile content. This material would produce the reaction that generates energy within the reactor.
This fuel recycling would reduce the amount of waste that would otherwise require permanent disposal, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, according to a Crap press release.
This INL project is still in the pre-construction development stage, a lab spokesman said Thursday.
The Senate also voted 95-2 in favor of an amendment from Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) to add $20 million for cooperative agreements and laboratory support at the National Nuclear Security Administration to expedite U.S. manufacturing of molybdenum–99.
The semiautonomous Energy Department agency has already dedicated $100 million in matching funds for three companies that aim to re-establish a long-absent domestic production capacity for the isotope, which decays into another isotope, technetium-99m, used globally in medical imaging and other procedures. The NNSA said in May it would provide another $40 million in cooperative agreements to companies seeking to produce the isotope.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued two construction licenses to Northwest Medical Isotopes, of Corvallis, Ore., for a production site in Columbia, Mo., and SHINE Medical Technologies for its Janesville, Wis., facility. SHINE is expected to file for an operations license this fall. SHINE has received $25 million in NNSA funding under the match program, while Northwest Medical did not apply previously.
A number of other companies, including BWX Technologies, NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes, and Coqui RadioPharmaceuticals, also aim to provide molybdenum-99 for the U.S. market.
“Medical isotopes are critical to American health care, and our Wisconsin entrepreneurs are working to deploy a Made-in-America source of this much-needed diagnostic tool for patients and families,” Baldwin said in a press release. “This amendment gets our domestic production back on track to ensure health care providers can source this critical medical isotope domestically and reduce our reliance on foreign sources.”
Consolidated Storage
Separately, the Natural Resources Defense Council and 39 other national and state environmental organizations on Tuesday sent a letter to the Senate requesting that it remove a section from its energy appropriations bill intended to boost the creation of consolidated interim storage facilities for used nuclear fuel.
Two ventures — Holtec International in New Mexico and Interim Storage Partners in West Texas — have applied for NRC licenses for such facilities as the Department of Energy and Congress decide whether to proceed with the stalled permanent repository at Yucca Mountain. Temporary storage could allow DOE to meet its congressional mandate to remove used fuel from nuclear reactor sites – though the deadline to begin this work was Jan. 31, 1998.
The Senate bill authorizes Energy Secretary Rick Perry to carry out a pilot program for licensing, building, and operating at least one federal interim storage facility. The Energy Department would have 120 days after the bill became law to issue a request for proposals for agreements to build such a facility.
The House bill does not contain this language.
“Slipping this provision into (the Senate’s) appropriations bill means that the proper legislative consideration and public debate have been disregarded. The ensuing contentiousness and litigation promises yet more problematic consequences for our already troubled national nuclear waste program,” the Tuesday letter said.
