After a fair amount of fanfare, a House bill to push forward development of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada appears to have run out of time in the waning days of the 115th Congress.
But, in securing strong votes of approval in committee and on the House floor, Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act did better than almost any other bill on nuclear waste filed over the last two years. These pieces of legislation almost uniformly died without a hearing in committee.
Shimkus introduced the bill in June 2017 in the House, where it quickly picked up 109 co-sponsors from both parties. It updated the original 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act with a host of measures supporters hoped would finally break the impasse on disposal of the nation’s stockpile of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from defense operations.
Congress in 1987 directed all that waste, now held on-site around the nation by the generators, be shipped to the isolated federal property in Nye County, Nev., for permanent disposal starting by Jan. 31, 1998. That deadline was a decade old before the Department of Energy filed its license application for Yucca Mountain, a process the Obama administration halted shortly after taking office in 2009. The Trump administration has not persuaded Congress to restart licensing.
The Shimkus bill, broadly, would have strengthened the federal government’s ability to build the facility, tried to resolve some of Nevada’s longstanding concerns about the project, and set a path for at least one interim storage site that could hold used fuel until the repository is ready.
Among other measures, H.R. 3053, if passed, would have:
- Transferred 147,000 acres of land from the Interior Department to the Energy Department for use in radioactive waste disposal.
- Required the secretary of energy within three years of the bill’s enactment to file a report with Congress and the state of Nevada on management of the withdrawn land, focused on the repository project.
- Authorized the Department of Energy to advance an agreement for consolidated, temporary storage of spent fuel with a non-federal organization.
- Increased benefits payments to local stakeholders from the figures in the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act for both interim storage and permanent disposal of spent fuel. For example, the annual payments prior to initial spent fuel receipt at a permanent repository would rise from $10 million to $15 million.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee in June 2017 voted 49-4 to advance the legislation to the full chamber, which in May of this year voted 340-72 to send it on to the Senate. It landed in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where it has sat since. The Senate was still in session as of Friday afternoon, trying to avert a partial government shutdown for agencies whose funding runs out at midnight, but there seemed little chance it would take up the Shimkus bill before ending its work in the current Congress.
Shimkus spokesman Jordan Haverly on Thursday appeared not quite ready to give up on the bill: “We don’t have a vote over there [in the Senate], so we’ll see what happens.” He did not say whether Shimkus would revive the legislation, if needed, in the 116th Congress scheduled to begin on Jan. 3.
Common wisdom in Washington has been that the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act fell afoul of electoral politics. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was seen to be wary of giving an assist to any legislation that could harm Sen. Dean Heller’s (R) re-election chances in broadly anti-Yucca Nevada and potentially endanger the GOP majority in the Senate. Heller lost to Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) in the November midterms, but Republicans still increased their Senate majority to 53.
There had been some thought that the bill might have a moment after the election, but that did not happen. Shimkus tried to add a shortened version of his Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act to the short-term budget bill being debated this week, but the House Rules Committee apparently scotched any and all amendments.
Other members of Congress also introduced several bills in 2017 and 2018 to tackle waste disposal and decommissioning of commercial reactors —with little success. Among them:
- H.R. 433, the Sensible Nuclear Waste Disposition Act from Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), would have prevented DOE from taking any steps to develop a repository for defense nuclear waste until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had ruled on the Yucca Mountain repository. It got no further than the House Energy and Commerce environment subcommittee after being introduced in January 2017.
- H.R. 456, the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act from Rep, Dina Titus (D-Nev.), would have required consent from local and state governments before spending any money from the Nuclear Waste Fund on a nuclear waste repository. It was also introduced in January 2017 and then sat in the House Energy and Commerce environment subcommittee.
- H.R. 474, the Interim Consolidated Storage Act from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), would authorize DOE to enter into new contracts or update existing deals for licensed consolidated interim storage facilities to take title to and hold spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. It also remains at House Energy and Commerce after being introduced in January 2017.
- On the upside, components of Rep. Bradley Schneider’s (D-Ill.) H.R. 3970, the STRANDED Act of 2017, made it into a “minibus” appropriations bill signed into law in September. The Energy Department must provide reports on funding and other resources available to municipalities near any nuclear power plant that is decommissioned, being decommissioned, or scheduled for closure within three years.
