The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Committee approved its bi-partisan American Nuclear Infrastructure Act of 2020 at a Wednesday business meeting.
If passed, a tall order, with less than a month remaining in the 116th Congress, the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act of 2020 (ANIA) would by January 2022 require the Department of Energy to report projected costs to maintain the country’s spent fuel supply, among other things.
The bill would require DOE to tell Congress: how much money the U.S. has paid for failing to dispose of nuclear waste from power plants, as required by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982; how much the DOE paid to reduce future payments projected to be made for the same reason; and how much the DOE spends each year to manage and dispose of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said the waste reporting provisions are some of the most direly necessary in the 61-page law.
Whitehouse called the idle inventory of 83,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel piling up at power plants across the country a liability and a hazard, and that if the bill became law, “the cost of disposing of that hazard will now actually be quantified so at least we can discuss and provide value to the technologies that will help strip that away.”
The act was proposed Nov. 17 by a bipartisan group of legislators, including Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works; Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) Mike Crapo (R-Id.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). The lawmakers introduced a draft of the legislation in late July.The Environmental and Public Works Committee held a hearing on a draft version of the bill in early August.
If the bill fails to advance to the Senate floor and then through the House of Representatives with only a few work weeks left in the 116th session of Congress, it would be declared null and void, like all pending legislation, after the 117th Congress gavels in during the first week of January.
Committee spokesperson Sarah Durdaller declined to confirm whether the bill would be introduced in the next session if it fails to pass this year.
“ANIA is an important bill with strong bipartisan support. The decision on bill introductions for next Congress will be made next year,” she wrote in an email to RadWaste Monitor Friday morning.
