Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) is bidding farewell to Congress after a more than 20-year stint as an Illinois representative, and he says Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) could replace him as the lower chamber’s main advocate for a permanent nuclear-waste disposal site.
Shimkus credited Duncan for helping secure a $600 million settlement the federal government paid to South Carolina in September to end the state’s years-long lawsuit over the Department of Energy’s failure to remove many metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium from the South Carolina beginning in 2016, as required by law.
“’I’m pretty happy with the state of South Carolina, and Jeff carried that mantle,” Shimkus said. Duncan’s district borders the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., where DOE stores the plutonium at issue in the lawsuit.
In a virtual Tuesday question-and-answer session at Illinois Tech, an address that will be among his last as a sitting member of Congress, Shimkus said politics and localism have ultimately blocked plans for Yucca Mountain, the permanent spent fuel disposal site he spent much of his career rallying and advocating for.
Shimkus has served in the House of Representatives since 1997 and has pushed repeatedly to start licensing and construction of the permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, which remains the country’s only federally designated, permanent disposal site for high-level radioactive waste created by commercial nuclear power plants and government nuclear weapons programs.
“We’ve got a major major void to fill with Mr. Shimkus retiring,” said Sean Finnerty, director of federal programs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, at a conference last week. “He has been a powerhouse for us and there’s been no bigger champion, Republican or Democrat, in trying to solve used fuel issues for us.”
Finnerty also said Rep. Duncan could follow in Shimkus’s footsteps.
