Where is Kamala Harris on nuclear?

Vice President Kamala Harris’ (D) positions on radioactive waste, when she’s taken any at all, hew closely to the Democratic orthodoxy of coupling any expansion of nuclear energy to the consent-based disposal of spent nuclear fuel.

Harris, fast becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for President following President Joe Biden’s (D) July withdrawal from the race, has said little publicly about issues affecting civilian nuclear programs at either the Department of Energy or the Nuclear Regulatory commission.

What record there is of her positions consists mostly of her votes as a U.S. Senator from California, and from remarks she made in 2019, when she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination for the first time.

“When we’re talking about nuclear power, we cannot think about it without thinking about nuclear waste,” Harris said in a 2019 interview with WMUR-TV, a local ABC affiliate in New Hampshire, home to one of the nation’s earliest presidential primary contests. “We cannot have an administration in the White House who overlooks the authority and the responsibility that state leaders have.”

In the WMUR interview, Harris described shipments of weapon-usable plutonium that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in 2018 sent to the Nevada National Security Site from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. 

The plutonium was to be turned into nuclear-weapon cores called pits. In the TV interview, Harris conflated this material with radioactive waste of the sort that would have been disposed of at the proposed, but unbuilt, Yucca Mountain repository in Nye County, Nev., a repository the state bitterly opposes.

Harris left the Senate in 2021, four years into her first term, when she was elected vice president. In those four years she amassed a voting record on nuclear nominees that mostly, but not always, matched the majority of Democrats in the chamber.

Like most Senate Democrats, Harris voted for both Annie Caputo and David Wright to be members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Both Caputo and Wright serve on the commission today. 

Likewise, Harris voted for then-commissioner Jeffery Baran to be reappointed to NRC in 2018. Baran’s nomination passed on a unanimous voice vote that year, but he lost his job in 2023 due to political pressure.

Other NRC nominees Harris supported include Bradley Crowell, who serves on the commission today, NRC Inspector General Robert Feitel and Christopher Hanson, the NRC’s current chair.

The only NRC nomination Harris opposed during her time in the Senate was the reappointment to the agency of Kristine Svinicki in 2017. Harris was one of only 9 nay votes. 

As a Senator, Harris also voted:

• Against the nomination of James “Rick” Perry to be Secretary of Energy, along with most Democrats.
• Against the nomination of Dan Brouillette to be Deputy Secretary of Energy, breaking with most Democrats.

Against the nomination of Jackie Wolcott to be Representative to the Vienna Office of the United Nations, and to be Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, breaking with most of her party both times.

Kristin Lucht contributed to this report from Washington.