Longtime Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), perhaps the loudest voice on Capitol Hill in favor of building a nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, on Aug. 30 announced he would not seek re-election in 2020.
Shimkus will until his retirement continue to press for a solution to the long impasse over permanent disposal of tens of thousands of metric tons of radioactive spent fuel and high-level waste, according to his staff and colleagues.
“He has given me no indication that he plans to step back from this issue for the remainder of his term,” spokesman Jordan Haverly said by email on Aug. 30.
“[W]e all know he will not stop pushing for a permanent storage solution for spent nuclear fuel,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said in a statement that day.
Other lawmakers are likely to take up his fight once Shimkus is gone, industry representatives and others said this week during the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit in Henderson, Nev. One name raised repeatedly was Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), who this year introduced nuclear waste legislation spearheaded in the prior Congress by Shimkus.
“Upon Congressman Shimkus’s departure in 16 months, those of us who share his commitment to action on nuclear waste disposal will undoubtedly miss our longstanding champion and his effective way of keeping the nuclear waste issue on the Congressional radar,” Katrina McMurrian, executive director of the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, told RadWaste Monitor by email. “However, others in Congress have demonstrated their support and are well-equipped to keep the pressure on the federal government to resolve these issues.”
This would have been Shimkus’ 13th campaign for the House. He was first elected in 1996 and has represented three different congressional districts in eastern Illinois.
“As Illinois candidates begin to circulate petitions next week, now is the time for me to announce that I will not be seeking re-election,” Shimkus said in a prepared statement last week. “It has been the honor of my lifetime to be asked by the people of Illinois to represent them in our nation’s capitol [sic].”
Shimkus is among a growing number of GOP House members who have said they will not run for re-election next year, after the party in 2018 lost its majority in the lower chamber. In his statement, Shimkus emphasized his family’s sacrifice while he served in Congress.
The statement made no reference to Shimkus’ longtime advocacy for moving forward with nuclear waste disposal and specifically Yucca Mountain.
The patch of federal land in the desert 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas was designated as the final resting place for the nation’s radioactive waste in the 1987 amendment to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Despite spending at least $15 billion studying and beginning to prepare the site, the federal government has made little progress in making it a reality. The Energy Department filed its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008, during the George W. Bush administration. Spurred by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later. The Trump administration has asked Congress in three successive budget cycles to fund resumption of licensing, so far to no effect.
Shimkus has noted that his congressional district holds no nuclear power plants or waste, but that both are found in the state of Illinois. He has said he believes part of his role as a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was to work toward a solution for disposal of that material.
In a 2014 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, Shimkus stated that “building a repository at Yucca Mountain would still be the fastest, best and most viable solution” for the country’s spent nuclear fuel.”
He has regularly appeared before other congressional committees, sometimes with a large pile of research documentation, to argue the case that the planned repository site has been scientifically found safe and secure. That put him directly at odds with Nevada’s congressional delegation, which strenuously opposes making their state home to other states’ radioactive waste.
In the last Congress, Shimkus introduced the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, which contained a long set of measures to strengthen the federal government’s ability to finally build the Yucca Mountain repository. He successfully pushed the bill through votes to send it out of the Energy and Commerce Committee and through the full House. The bill never got a vote in the Senate before the 115th Congress ended on Jan. 3 of this year, but Shimkus co-sponsored largely similar legislation introduced in May by McNerney. That bill remains before the Energy and Commerce Committee and a number of other House panels with jurisdiction, while a corresponding measure has been pending since April from Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.).
McNerney’s central-California 9th Congressional District is hundreds of miles from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in San Diego. But he has joined other politicians from the state in pressing for removal of 3.5 million pounds of radioactive spent fuel assemblies from the plant following its 2013 closure. That site in particular has become a flashpoint over on-site waste storage, given its location alongside the Pacific Ocean in heavily populated, earthquake prone Southern California. Those concerns were exacerbated by an August 2018 incident in which one used-fuel canister was left at risk of an 18-foot drop while being placed into storage.
As used fuel stays at SONGS and other nuclear plants around the country, for years if not decades, pressure will grow on Congress to do something – even with Shimkus no longer there.
“There’s a lot of leadership there. This issue will always have friends,” Rod McCullum, senior director for used fuel and decommissioning at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said at the RadWaste Summit.
“Where there’s a void, someone’s always willing to fill it” in Washington, D.C., an industry source noted on the sidelines of the conference.
The industry representative said a single lawmaker should not be considered the be-all and end-all for promoting a certain position on nuclear waste on Capitol Hill. He noted that when Reid retired, the industry thought Congress would finally move Yucca Mountain forward – but that has not happened.
Other legislators have pressed for strategies that, specifically or by inference, do not involve Yucca Mountain.
Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) in April filed the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2019, an updated version of legislation that failed in two prior Congresses over the last decade. The bill would, among other measures: establish a stand-alone agency for managing nuclear waste; lay out a process for siting temporary storage and permanent disposal sites for waste; and require approval for any site from impacted state, local, and tribal governments.
Robert Halstead, who leads Nevada’s efforts to block the Yucca Mountain repository as executive director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects, said Shimkus’ pending retirement could create room for Nevada’s congressional delegation to amend the Murkowski bill to require consent specifically for Yucca Mountain.
“I think this will help Senators Cortez Masto and Rosen with the effort to amend S. 1234 in the Senate to extend consent to Nevada, and then pass S. 1234 in the Senate, and bring it to the House, to stop McNerney and Shimkus from wasting more years and more billions, in a mean-spirited and futile attempt to screw Nevada yet again with H.R. 2699,” he said by mail on Aug. 30.
Speaking on one panel at the conference, other issue observers questioned the likelihood of any of these bills being passed as the 2020 presidential race heats up. The Iowa caucuses are just five months away, noted Seth Kirshenberg, executive director of the Energy Communities Alliance.
“So we are in what we call crazy season in D.C.,” he said. “We’ve got the presidential election coming up in 15 months, which is pretty amazing. What that usually means in D.C. is that legislation is not going to move like it normally moves.”
