Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office.
In his first 100 days in office, President Donald Trump has moved from an ambiguous stance on Yucca Mountain to an impending showdown with Nevada over the seemingly imminent resumption of licensing for the nuclear waste repository with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The White House made its position clear last month when it included $120 million in its fiscal 2018 budget proposal to resume the licensing process and support a robust interim storage program for nuclear waste. Opponents in Nevada – including Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and lawmakers Rep. Dina Titus (D), and Sens. Dean Heller (R) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D) – have vowed relentless opposition to the project’s revival.
The Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects estimates that the remaining license review could take 400 hearing days over a four- to five-year span. Both sides have expressed a high degree of confidence in prevailing before the NRC.
Major players from both sides of the aisle converged Wednesday on Washington for a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce environment subcommittee, where lawmakers considered Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) draft Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, which would trigger the licensing restart.
Titus, in an interview with RadWaste Monitor on Thursday, said she was encouraged by the hearing, which she called a good opportunity to remove emotion from the debate and discuss the facts, with water rights being the most important. Shimkus’ bill would remove Nevada’s right to regulate air and water quality at Yucca Mountain, one tool in the state’s belt to stop the project. Titus also voiced concern about the potential impact on Las Vegas’ tourism industry should there be any accidents or mishaps with transportation of the material to the facility.
“(That) would devastate the whole economy and state of Nevada,” Titus said. “When people talk about, ‘This is good for economic development, it’s going to create jobs,’ the problems it creates are much worse than any potential jobs.”
Lake Barrett, the former head of DOE’s defunct Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which led previous efforts to develop Yucca Mountain before the Obama administration stopped the project, said in an interview this week he anticipates the debate turning into a partnership to address Nevada’s concerns.
“It’s time to move forward in a new way, and we now have the opportunity to do that,” Barrett said. “I hope we as a nation, including the important party of Nevada, find a way to address concerns that Nevadans have of fairness and emotions.”
Barrett said Trump’s DOE is far more prepared to defend the application before the NRC than previous departments were in the early 2000s, as DOE and NRC have since completed work for the site’s environmental impact statement. The NRC in May 2016 issued the final supplement to DOE’s EIS, which was filed in 2002, finding the impact to groundwater from any potential leaks of spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste at the site would be “small.”
Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Bob Halstead this week called Wednesday’s hearing a “total whitewash” on the transportation risks and impacts for Yucca Mountain. He said by email the Shimkus bill fails to address the specifics for tapping into the Nuclear Waste Fund, the $40 billion account established to pay for Yucca Mountain. He asked how Congress expects to pay the $330 million cost to NRC and $1.7 billion cost to DOE for the licensing process that remains if the NWF is not addressed until several years down the road.
The agency has said it plans to fully adjudicate the hundreds of contentions in opposition to the license application, including challenges to Yucca Mountain’s site suitability, disposal concept, groundwater impacts, rail access, and impacts on Las Vegas.
