The House of Representatives on Friday approved a massive appropriations package that provides nothing to resume licensing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, despite pleas late in the week from four Republican lawmakers.
In a nearly party-line vote, the Democrat-led chamber passed a roughly $1.3 trillion, six-bill spending “minibus” for the fiscal 2021 budget year beginning Oct. 1. House Republicans voted uniformly against the measure, along with 12 Democrats and one Independent.
“We should at least comply with the law. I would think that a law-writing body in Congress and the appropriations should at least follow the law,” Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) said Wednesday morning in early debate on the legislative rule for H.R. 7617. “Well, again, this bill rule doesn’t do that and this bill doesn’t do that.”
Shimkus, who is not seeking re-election in November after years as the House’s leading proponent for completing the licensing proceeding, was referring to language in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and its 1987 amendment. Under those bills, the Department of Energy had until Jan. 31, 1998, to begin disposal in Nevada of high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations and spent fuel from commercial power plants. The agency still does not have anywhere to put the material.
Shimkus’ comments were echoed in floor debate on the appropriations measure Thursday by Reps. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), and Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.).
No one directly mentioned the fact that the amount in the minibus for nuclear waste management — $27.5 million for an Interim Storage and Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program at the Department of Energy – is exactly the amount requested by the Trump administration.
“Let’s be clear: It doesn’t matter whether the Republicans or the Democrats control the House of Representatives or the White House, the law’s ignored because of the politics of Nevada,” Duncan said.
In a statement of administration policy Thursday, the White House threatened to veto the House bill as it stands now. It cited a long list of objections, but supported the nuclear waste language: “The Administration appreciates that the bill provides $28 million to develop and implement a robust interim storage program. The Administration looks forward to working with Congress to provide greater access to the Nuclear Waste Fund.”
The Senate has yet to release any appropriations legisltion for 2021. A representative for Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) did not respond to a call Thursday regarding the schedule for the panel to release its bill and what it might include for nuclear waste management.
In the last months of the George W. Bush administration, the Energy Department in 2008 applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build and operate a geologic repository about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. That plan remains deeply unpopular at the state level in Nevada, and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). pressed the Obama administration to abandon the project.
The Obama White House defunded the licensing proceeding in 2010, later establishing an approach recommended by its Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future for a “consent-based” search for new locations for separate repositories for commercial and defense waste. That program fizzled early as President Donald Trump took office in January 2017 and turned back to Yucca Mountain.
The Trump administration requested appropriations in fiscal 2018, 2019, and 2020 to resume licensing at the Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Republican-led Senate never supported the requests, instead favoring centralized interim storage to expedite the relocation of waste. The House did support licensing while the GOP had the majority, but the money never made it through the appropriations conference process. The lower chamber also turned against Yucca Mountain after Democrats took the majority in the 2018 midterms.
In February, just days after Trump tweeted in support of Nevada’s opposition to taking other states’ waste, the White House rolled out a budget that zeroes out Yucca Mountain.
Instead, the $27.5 million would primarily be used at the Department of Energy for early work on a program to centralize nuclear waste in a limited number of temporary facilities. That would include research and development on storage, transportation, and disposal systems, along with searching for potential locations as part of the program to develop the program.
Leadership at the Energy Department has said the new request is made in recognition that Congress simply was not going to support Yucca Mountain, so another approach was necessary. That explanation has faced some skepticism on Capitol Hill – Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), whose 4th Congressional District covers DOE’s waste-holding Hanford Site, has called it political. Trump lost to Democrat Hillary Clinton in Nevada during the 2016 presidential election, and hopes for a better outcome there in November against presumptive challenger Joe Biden.
Nonetheless, the House minibus would provide “expenses necessary for nuclear waste disposal activities to carry out the purposes of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 … as amended, including interim storage activities, $27,500,000, to remain available until expended, of which $7,500,000 shall be derived from the Nuclear Waste Fund.”
“Failure to move forward with the Yucca Mountain site jeopardizes our ability to continue to innovate in the future and is unfair to the communities who have dealt with the cost of housing nuclear waste for the past 50 years,” according to McMorris Rodgers, whose 5th Congressional District is near the Hanford Site.
There is now over 100,000 metric tons of waste spread across 121 sites in 39 states, Shimkus said. The majority of that is used fuel rods, but also what Duncan called “yucky stuff” – high-level waste at Hanford, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and other Energy Department properties.
Shimkus and others noted that nuclear utilities paid billions of dollars into the Nuclear Waste Fund established under the 1982 legislation to pay for the permanent repository. That money was ultimately paid by ratepayers for those companies, before collections were cut off in 2014, they said. The fund held just under $41 billion as of fiscal 2019, including interest income and other revenue sources.
Nuclear power plant operators began suing the government after the Department of Energy missed its 1998 deadline to begin taking the waste. They have collected more than $7 billion to date, and tens of billions of dollars more could be paid from the federal Judgment Fund. That is a $2.2 million daily cost to U.S. taxpayers, Shimkus and Simpson said in House debate.
The federal government previously paid $15 billion to confirm the Yucca Mountain site would be safe for 1 million years of disposal, Shimkus said. Completing the licensing process would enable Nevada to complete its case and prove otherwise, he said.
Simpson and other Republican lawmakers said the House appropriations bill in total would inevitably be opposed by the Senate and vetoed by the White House. They focused on hundreds of billions of emergency funding spread throughout the six pieces of legislation aimed at stimulating the economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic – which the White House did cite in its statement Thursday.
