The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed all three nominees to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just hours after the chamber’s Appropriations Committee approved a budget proposal that provided no money for the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository in Nevada.
While no one would say so on the record, the connection appeared reasonably certain – particularly given Sen. Dean Heller’s (R-Nev.) widely reported Yucca-related hold on at least one of the nominees.
By a voice vote during a sparsely attended session after 5 p.m., the Senate approved en bloc the confirmations of Annie Caputo, a nuclear policy adviser to Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.); David Wright, an energy consultant and former president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners; and Jeff Baran, an attorney and member of the commission since 2014.
The vote ensures the commission, which had been at just three members, did not face potential loss of quorum when Baran’s current term ends June 30.
“I am glad the Senate has restored the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to its full slate of five commissioners,” Barrasso said in a prepared statement. “Annie Caputo and David Wright will be outstanding commissioners at the NRC.”
The senator notably did not mention Baran, whose confirmation he called “a big ask” during a hearing last October. Barrasso at the time had a number of questions for Baran, including on the nominee’s dissent in a June 2017 commission vote on spending related to Yucca Mountain.
Nonetheless, the Environment and Public Works Committee in October advanced Baran’s nomination to the full Senate, where it sat for months. Caputo and Wright, meanwhile, had been waiting since July 2017 for a floor vote.
The NRC is the adjudicator for the Department of Energy license application for the planned underground facility in Nye County, Nev., for spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The George W. Bush administration filed the application in 2008. The Obama administration canceled the proceeding two years later, but the Trump administration has sought to revive the licensing – without support so far from Congress.
It has been widely reported that Heller placed a hold on Caputo’s nomination as part of his continuing battle to block tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste from being shipped to his state. Politico reported Friday that Heller had held up two nominations.
Last year, Heller and fellow Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) expressed concerns about Caputo and Wright’s apparent support for Yucca Mountain.
The White House asked for nearly $170 million in fiscal 2019 for the NRC and DOE to resume the licensing for the waste repository. Last week, the House Appropriations Committee upped the ante in its energy and water funding bill by recommending $270 million for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
But Heller won two significant victories Thursday against Yucca Mountain, just a few hours before the vote on the NRC nominees. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved its own energy and water bill with no money for the disposal project. And the upper chamber also broke with the House by stripping out $30 million for Yucca Mountain from its version of the National Defense Authorization Act.
“As the House was busy this a.m. authorizing funds to store defense nuclear waste in #NV, I was working to squash their ongoing efforts. And I was successful. The funding bill passed by the Senate Approps Committee today does not fund a single $ for #Yucca,” Heller tweeted early Thursday afternoon.
In a series of tweets and a press release, Heller lauded his action against Yucca Mountain but made no mention of the NRC nominees. His office did not respond to a request for comment on the confirmation vote.
Heller was not necessarily the only force behind the confirmation vote. Democrats have been keen to ensure Baran stayed on the commission. The two new members are Republicans, while Baran is a former Democratic congressional staffer.
Baran’s second term ends on June 30, 2018. The two new members are filling vacancies, Caputo through June 30, 2022, and Wright through June 30, 2020. The other commission members are Chairman Kristine Svinicki, who the Senate last year re-upped to a third term to June 30, 2022, and Commissioner Stephen Burns, whose terms ends June 30 of next year.
Cortez Masto Wants to Know About NRC’s Yucca Work
Separately, Cortez Masto is seeking details about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s work on licensing Yucca Mountain.
In a May 18 letter to Svinicki, Nevada’s junior senator said she worries the commission is laying groundwork to work on the Department of Energy’s decade-old Yucca license application, even though Congress has not funded the proceeding at DOE or the NRC.
“Even though Congress has yet to appropriate any funds to the NRC related to Yucca Mountain, I am concerned the NRC is already moving in a direction to use allocated funds for a purpose that has not yet been authorized,” Cortez Masto wrote.
Cortez Masto cited letters and memorandums Svinicki wrote to federal and state officials last year, in which the NRC chief described fact-finding about potential adjudication sites in Nevada.
The senator asked Svinicki to describe these efforts in more detail, and to describe the commission’s consideration of adjudication sites outside of Nevada, including at the NRC’s Rockville, Md., headquarters. Without setting a date by which she would like a reply from Svinicki, Cortez Masto said she would appreciate a “prompt” response from NRC.
If DOE ever resumes its application to store spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, as the Donald Trump administration wishes, the NRC will judge the application in what experts estimate will be a two- to five-year process. Nevada has already lodged hundreds of technical challenges to DOE’s application.
