PHOENIX – Two Nevada officials with distinctly different opinions on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository last week offered distinctly different views on what the Trump administration’s latest budget might mean for the future of the always-embattled project.
In February, the White House issued a fiscal 2021 spending plan that included nothing to resume licensing for the underground disposal facility in Nye County, Nev. That reversed its efforts in three prior budgets to persuade Congress to appropriate money for licensing, with no success.
The question to panelists at a Waste Management Symposia discussion on high-level waste was whether this is the administration’s new, firm position, or an election-year strategy that could be reversed again in 2021.
“Here we are in a situation where the president has asked for money three times and Congress has shown their ability to get nothing done. I think it’s all wide open after the election, to be quite frankly honest with you.,” Nye County Commissioner Leo Blundo told the audience.
The White House confirmed on Feb. 6 that it would not seek funds for the project in the budget year beginning Oct. 1. That came just hours after President Donald Trump tweeted his support for the people of Nevada against Yucca Mountain, and ahead of his rally in the state and the Nevada Democratic Party’s presidential caucuses later in the month. Even some Republican members of Congress, such as Rep. Dan Newhouse (Wash.), have called the decision political.
“Some believe that this is just a cynical ploy for votes in November. I’m inclined to take the president at his word,” said Fred Dilger, a planning administrator with Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, which has led the state’s opposition to Yucca Mountain. “So we can expect no new funding for another four years, regardless of who’s elected.”
Both Blundo and Dilger offered support for their position.
The Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects has investigated the situation and has cause to believe Trump’s position has evolved, Dilger said. If that is the case, there is likely to be no money for the repository over the next four years, no matter who is president as of January 2021 – as Democrats generally have opposed the project. If Trump is re-elected, and history suggests there is then a good chance a Democrat is elected in 2024, that dry spell could stretch to 2032, according to Dilger.
Blundo, though, noted that Trump has major contributors in Las Vegas who do not want radioactive waste anywhere near the tourist mecca. Yucca Mountain is about 100 miles northwest of the city.
“I think one of the most important concerns is that Las Vegas, and those individuals in Las Vegas, doesn’t want to see nuclear waste go through Las Vegas. Not Las Vegas township, not Las Vegas city, not Las Vegas anything, not Las Vegas, N.M.,” according to Blundo, the nuclear waste liaison for the Nye County Board of Commissioners and a Republican candidate for Congress.
Billionaire Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson, a longtime Trump backer, plans to contribute $100 million to the president’s re-election campaign and other Republicans, the London Guardian reported in February. Adelson has joined other Las Vegas casino owners in urging the federal government against funding any work on Yucca Mountain.
That pressure, though, is theoretically relieved if Trump is re-elected on Nov. 3 and subsequently does not need to focus as much on the wishes of his campaign contributors.
The third panelist, Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition Executive Director Katrina McMurrian, acknowledged the difficulty of making significant progress on the issue in an election year. Congress is unlikely to pass a full-year budget ahead of the election, relying instead on stopgap spending measures to keep the federal government operating in the early months of fiscal 2021, she said.
Continuing resolutions would largely freeze agencies’ funding at current levels without new programs, and Congress for the current budget gave nothing to any program to develop nuclear waste disposal or storage facilities.
“No one’s going to be surprised that it’s a presidential election year and it’s a super, super political environment, and that we don’t expect things to get any easier with respect to moving forward on authorization or appropriations bills,” McMurrian said.
In the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Congress assigned the Energy Department to dispose of the nation’s high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations and used reactor fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. It amended the law five years later to direct that the radioactive materials be deposited under Yucca Mountain.
There is now roughly 100,000 metric tons of waste waiting for disposition, stored at 80 locations around the nation – long past the Jan. 31, 1998, deadline set by Congress for DOE to begin taking the material.
All that exists at Yucca Mountain is a 5-mile test tunnel, Dilger noted, even after the federal government has spent $15 billion to determine the location is safe and secure for waste disposal. The Energy Department filed its license application for the site with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding just two years later.
Nevada’s state officials and congressional delegation have fought the project from the start, unwilling to accept other states’ radioactive waste and warning that earthquakes or other natural phenomena could release toxic materials into the environment. Leaders in rural Nye County have taken a different view, emphasizing the jobs and other economic benefits that would come from building and operating the repository.
In any case, there has been little movement in advancing a final answer to management of nuclear waste over the last decade. The Obama administration initiated a “consent-based” approach for selecting sites for waste storage and disposal, but that program had barely begun before Trump took office in January 2017.
After going 0-3 in efforts to resume licensing for Yucca Mountain, the Trump administration for fiscal 2021 requested $27.5 million to initiate an Interim Storage and Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program.
The Waste Management Symposia panelists acknowledged that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act remains the law of the land, meaning using the federal property at Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste disposal does as well. But, Dilger pointed out, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette rightly told lawmakers in one recent DOE budget hearing that appropriations bills also become law, and Congress has not funded the repository through them for a decade.
“The bottom line, we think, is that Yucca Mountain is not the future of the high-level waste repository program of the United States,” he said. “We’re curious to see what will happen with $27 million for interim storage, we don’t know if that will make it through the budget, we don’t quite understand that.”
The Energy Department has discussed the broad outline of the new program in budget documents and testimony on Capitol Hill, but details remain scarce.
The new funding is intended to “develop and implement a robust storage program,” starting Oct. 1, covering operations including early design and development of measures to identify possible site locations. The administration is looking for “innovative” options, according to both President Donald Trump and the Energy Department.
Appearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee earlier this month, Assistant DOE Secretary for Nuclear Energy Rita Baranwal said the agency intends to issue a request for proposals for basic design of an interim facility for waste storage.
While the idea has been around for decades, the idea of consolidated interim storage (or monitored retrievable storage) has gained prominence in recent years. Theoretically, it offers DOE an opportunity to remove spent fuel from on-site storage at nuclear power plants, thus meeting part of its congressional directive. Two corporate teams are already seeking Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses for such facilities, in Texas and New Mexico.
That approach is not without its own challenges. To start, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act forbids the Energy Department from taking title to waste until a permanent repository is ready.
McMurrian reaffirmed that the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, an organization representing energy companies and utility commissions, supports both interim storage and permanent disposal as the means for dealing with radioactive waste. But she also cited a lack of clarity from the Energy Department on it new program.
“Despite a number of DOE Hill appearances since the budget was released, we remain unclear about what DOE really has in mind and how it’s going to be funded,” she said.
