A bill to reauthorize the Department of Energy’s West Valley Demonstration Project Act was reported out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on a voice vote Tuesday.
The measure was passed in a bloc of 20 bills considered at once by the panel, including committee Chair Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) Nuclear Energy Leadership Act. The West Valley legislation, which passed the House of Representatives in March, is now poised for a vote by the full Senate on an as-yet undetermined date.
There was no discussion of the West Valley measure or most of the other bills during the hearing that lasted less than 45 minutes.
H.R. 1138, sponsored by Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), reauthorizes West Valley funding at $75 million per year through fiscal 2026, an amount equal to the enacted budget for fiscal 2019 and the fiscal 2020 figure sought by the White House and the House of Representatives. The earlier authorization of the 1980 West Valley Demonstration Project Act placed the funding level at $5 million annually.
If it becomes law, the Reed bill would order a Government Accountability Office report on radioactive waste at West Valley, including types of waste, disposal options, and disposal costs.
The reauthorization bill does not, however, order waste at West Valley be treated as defense-related, as a 2018 version of Reed’s legislation would have done. Had that language passed into law, it could have opened the door for shipping the material to the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
West Valley reauthorization has passed the House two years in a row, but the clock ran out on the last Congress without any Senate consideration of the 2018 bill. The Congressional Budget Office has not prepared a cost estimate for the current measure.
The 200-acre West Valley Demonstration Project sits within the state-owned, 3,300-acre Western New York Nuclear Service Center. The demonstration project was home to an operating commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plant from 1966 to 1972.
