The ranking member of the House’s energy and water appropriations subcommittee said Tuesday he wants more clarity on a White House proposal to move cash for its consent-based interim storage effort out of the Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program.
“I don’t know what the reasoning behind it is,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told Exchange Monitor Tuesday after a markup in the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee. “If they funded [interim storage] and it didn’t subtract from nuclear energy funding, then I probably wouldn’t have a problem. Why not leave it where it actually ought to be?”
In its 2023 fiscal year budget request, the Joe Biden administration again proposed moving funding for interim storage to the Integrated Waste Management Systems subprogram from the Nuclear Waste Disposal account within the Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program.
Congress refused that request last year in the omnibus 2022 spending bill passed in March, but the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee on Tuesday appeared to go along with elements of the administration’s plan, sending to the full committee a bill that included, as requested, only about $10 million for the Nuclear Waste Disposal account. The funds would be used to guard and maintain the moribund Yucca Mountain site, according to the bill.
Simpson told the Monitor Tuesday that he did not believe such a spending shuffle would survive the appropriations process.
The White House says its 2023 budget request includes a total of $53 million for interim storage within Integrated Waste Management Systems, though aside from $10 million in proposed new spending for local communities to participate in a consent-based siting process for a federal interim depot, the Biden request for interim storage is not dramatically higher than the 2022 appropriation of roughly $20 million.
Overall, the subcommittee’s bill includes around $1.78 billion for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, about 6% more than the roughly $1.67 billion the Biden administration requested for the office in March.
As of Wednesday, the full House Appropriations Committee had not scheduled a markup for the energy and water development appropriations act the subcommittee cleared Tuesday.
