The second intercameral congressional confrontation over Yucca Mountain in as many years seemed all but imminent Friday, after the Senate scheduled a Monday vote on a Department of Energy appropriations bill that would again provide no funding for the proposed nuclear-waste repository.
The Senate has been debating a so-called fiscal 2019 minibus appropriations package all week. The measure includes some $35 billion for the Department of Energy in fiscal 2019, but zeroed out the Trump administration’s request for nearly $170 million to resume licensing of Yucca at DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Of more than 80 amendments proposed for the Senate minibus, none attempted to appropriate funds for Yucca within either agency. The Senate’s energy appropriations bill, which was approved by the chamber’s Appropriations Committee in May, does not even mention Yucca Mountain by name.
Meanwhile, the House is all-in on Yucca. In May, the lower chamber approved a 2019 minibus appropriations package that included $100 million more than the Donald Trump administration sought for Yucca licensing in the budget year beginning Oct. 1. The House bill passed along an essentially party-line vote of 235-179. Republicans control both chambers of Congress.
This same dispute played out in the last budget proceeding, and the omnibus appropriations bill signed into law in March gave nothing to Yucca Mountain or shorter-term storage of radioactive waste. That means DOE remains at a standstill in its efforts to meet its congressional mandate to remove spent reactor fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants.
The Senate wants Congress to act on an interim nuclear-waste storage site before dealing with the question of a permanent repository. The Senate spending bill set for a vote at 5:30 p.m. Monday would direct DOE to start work on a pilot program for licensing, construction, and operation of at least one consolidated interim storage site for radioactive waste. Waste at shuttered power plants would be first in line for transportation to such a facility.
No such interim waste facility exists today, but New Jersey-based Holtec, and a separate partnership of Waste Control Specialists and Orano, are each seeking NRC licenses to build one. Holtec wants to build a storage site in Lea County, N.M., that could store some 100,000 metric tons of fuel. The Waste Control Specialists-Orano partnership wants to build a smaller facility in West Texas for up to 40,000 metric tons of waste.
Meanwhile, anti-Yucca Mountain crusader Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) — who has made opposition to the permanent repository a centerpiece of his re-election campaign this year — took credit this week for preventing an annual military policy bill from authorizing the storage of defense nuclear waste at the proposed Nye County, Nev., facility.
The Senate passed its version of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act on Monday. The bill did not, as the House’s version of the act did, authorize $30 million for DOE to send defense nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, should the repository be built.
