President Donald Trump on Sept. 21 signed the first congressionally approved “minibus” appropriations bill for fiscal 2019, which cuts out all proposed funding at the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing a nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The White House made no mention of the matter in statements on the bill, which Trump signed while in Nevada.
Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) accompanied the president in Las Vegas, then issued a statement Monday addressing the legislative victory against Yucca Mountain.
“Once again, I stopped the U.S. House of Representatives from funding the failed #YuccaMountain project,” he said on Twitter. “A state that doesn’t even produce nuclear waste shouldn’t be forced to serve as the nation’s nuclear waste dump.”
Both Heller and fellow Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) emphasized their efforts to ensure the upper chamber of Congress did not sign off on any House-proposed funding for the project.
“I am equally proud of what I was able to keep out of the funding package: federal funds for Yucca Mountain,” Cortez Masto said last week in a prepared statement. “I will continue to fight tooth and nail against plans to put a radioactive waste dump in Nevadans’ backyard. Nevadans can rest assured I will continue working to defend them and their interests in Washington.”
Congress in 1987 designated the federal property in Nye County as the spot for a repository that would hold tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from federal defense nuclear operations. Beyond some preliminary work, the project has made little progress over more than three decades.
In February, the Trump administration asked for nearly $170 million to fund resumption of Yucca licensing activities at DOE and the NRC, which were defunded nearly a decade ago by then-President Barack Obama.
The House of Representatives pushed that up to $270 million, while the Senate zeroed out all money for the project. Negotiations on a multi-agency appropriations bill covering DOE and the NRC finished with nothing for Yucca, and both houses of Congress approved the legislation earlier this month. Fiscal 2019 begins on Oct. 1.
The White House got the same result for the current fiscal 2018, when it asked for about $150 million for Yucca Mountain.
There was no word from the Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission on whether they would again seek appropriations for the program in the 2020 federal budget year. Federal agencies generally submit their annual funding plans in February. An NRC spokesman said the agency does not comment ahead of time on future budget plans, while the Energy Department did not respond to a query.
One House lawmaker indicated the battle over Yucca Mountain will continue, and possibly soon.
“We’re going to keep trying, and we’ve got a couple of different alternatives that we’re going to pursue, not only before the year is out but in the next Congress as well,” Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) told Michigan radio station WJSM last week.
Upton’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week.
“We really don’t have anything to add beyond the congressman’s previous statement RE: lack of funding in Minibus 1.0,” Jordan Haverly, spokesman for the resolutely pro-Yucca Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), said by email Thursday. “I think the answers you’re looking for can only be found on the other side of the Capitol.”
The Senate in recent years has focused on interim storage of spent fuel in a small number of locations, rather than permanent disposal, as the best near-term means for the Energy Department to meets its 1982 congressional mandate to remove the waste from power plants. It has also been assumed that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would not allow passage of any legislation that promoted Yucca Mountain at the possible expense of Heller’s re-election chances in November and the GOP majority in the Senate.
Agency Funding
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will have $898.4 million to spend on salaries and expenses in the next fiscal year, compared to its request for $958.1 million. Licensees and other revenue sources would deliver $770.5 million of that, with the rest coming from $127.9 million in congressional appropriations.
The biggest loser is its nuclear materials and waste safety line item: The agency asked for $183.7 million and got $108.6 million. The largest slice of that roughly $75 million reduction – offset by budget plus-ups elsewhere — is presumably the nearly $50 million the regulator wanted for Yucca Mountain licensing.
“[W]e just got the numbers and still need to decide how to implement them,” NRC spokesman David McIntyre said Monday.
The Energy Department gets $35.7 billion, with some money for nuclear waste management activities even in the absence of Yucca Mountain. That encompasses $63.9 million for used nuclear fuel disposition research and development at the Office of Nuclear Energy and $22.5 million for the Integrated Waste Management System.
The legislation provides $150 million for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). That is $30 million more than requested for the program to clean up sites contaminated by weapons and civilian energy programs managed by the Manhattan Engineer District and Atomic Energy Commission from the 1940s to the 1960s.
The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent panel of experts for the Department of Energy, received $3.6 million.
