Nevada’s congressional delegation wants to codify the consent-based siting of future nuclear waste repositories, an amendment filed for the House’s 2023 National Defense Authorization Act shows.
If the House adopts Rep. Dina Titus’ (D-Nev.) amendment to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the law would prohibit the Department of Energy from unilaterally using cash in the federal Nuclear Waste Fund “for expenditures involving repositories for disposing of spent nuclear fuel or high-level radioactive waste.”
Under the amendment, DOE could only start using the fund for repository development after it has entered into written agreements with the host state’s governor as well as local and tribal governments.
As of Wednesday, Congress was still out of town after Independence Day and Titus’s proposed amendment had yet to see a vote. According to the House majority leader’s calendar, votes should resume in the evening on July 12.
The language of Titus’s amendment is similar to that of a bill she and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto have repeatedly tried to push through Congress, most recently in March 2021. So far, that measure, which would also prevent DOE from accessing the Nuclear Waste Fund without consent from host communities, had yet to make it through either chamber.
The Nevada delegation are particularly interested in seeing some sort of consent-based siting rules put on the books, as the Silver State is home to the moribund Yucca Mountain site — currently the only congressionally-approved location to house the nation’s spent nuclear fuel.
Yucca Mountain was defunded by the Barack Obama administration in 2010 and after an ill-fated attempt by President Donald Trump to restart the project, the Joe Biden administration decided to keep the purse strings closed.
Meanwhile, DOE is in the midst of its latest attempt to site a potential federal interim storage facility for spent fuel. The agency has said that it is reviewing responses to a November request for information on the subject, and that it will provide a funding opportunity for potentially interested communities in the early fall.
