Party-line divisions about future spent nuclear fuel policies emerged in a Wednesday House hearing, during which one lawmaker said work on the issue could stretch into the next Congress.
“I’m not for interim storage,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said during the hearing of the House Energy climate, and grid security subcommittee, which he chairs. “I believe we’ve got a permanent repository, Yucca Mountain, we spent a lot of money on.”
Rep. Cathy Rodgers (R-Wash.), chair of the full committee, asked the four witnesses at the hearing what the federal government needed to do before it could “restart the licensing process” for Yucca, which DOE walked away from more than 10 years ago for political reasons during the Barack Obama (D) administration.
Rodgers is not running for reelection, but her counterpart on the full committee, ranking member Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), is. On Wednesday, Pallone said interim storage is “much more likely than, you know, Yucca Mountain.”
However, Pallone also said he agreed with one witness, former DOE spent-fuel head Lake Barrett, that interim storage and a permanent repository like Yucca had to move hand in hand to succeed.
Barrett, formerly principal deputy director for DOE’s now-defunct Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, was a witness at the hearing and remains an advocate for both prioritizing development of a permanent repository and creating an independent nuclear waste agency outside of the Department of Energy.
“There has to be a credible, geologic disposal system to back up interim storage somewhere,” Barrett said. Without a permanent disposal site, “you’re just transferring the canisters from one community to another community. And why would a state want to accept that without assurance that the government, or its agent, is going to perform in the future?”
Barrett was answering Pallone’s invitation to assess the Joe Biden (D) administration’s efforts to get communities to consent to host spent fuel from nuclear power plants in a federally owned facility.
Though both the House and Senate have now crafted big nuclear policy reforms, including the House’s Atomic Energy Advancement Act that passed the chamber with an overwhelmingly bipartisan majority in February, neither chamber’s legislation touched on spent fuel, for decades an intractable problem in Congress.
In Wednesday’s hearing, subcommittee ranking member Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said she was hopeful that the House bill would pass the Senate, which has produced competing legislation, and be signed into law during the current congress.
Like the Senate bill, the House bill “didn’t talk about the spent fuel issues so we’re going to have to do that as this Congress progresses and into the next Congress,” DeGette said.
In the meantime, there was some bipartisan agreement in Wednesday’s subcommittee hearing about one thing: the lack of a national spent-fuel strategy imperils deployment of new nuclear power plants.
Both Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), whose district includes the shuttered Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating station, and Duncan acknowledge that the nuclear renaissance many in industry and Congress have hoped for during the Biden administration is being held up by the spent fuel question.
“It shouldn’t be,” John Wagner, director of the Idaho National Laboratory, said at the hearing. “But it is.”
