The Donald Trump administration requested $150 million for 2018 across the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to restart DOE’s application to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a nuclear waste repository.
The $120 million of funding within DOE encompasses $110 million for Yucca licensing and $10 million for an interim storage program to consolidate more than 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants until the permanent repository is ready. The Department of Energy is required to build and operate such a facility under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
The bulk of the DOE request would go toward standing up a new Yucca Mountain and Interim Storage Program that would be staffed by 83 full-time employees in Washington and Las Vegas. Just over half of these by payroll would be in Washington, according to the budget request. To staff up those offices, DOE would shift over 53 employees from other Office of Nuclear Energy programs —including the canceled Used Nuclear Fuel Disposition R&D and Integrated Waste Management System operations — and hire 30 full-timers.
The Yucca Mountain funds at the NRC would primarily be used to revive the license adjudication for the license. NRC officials this week said this could include using 71 full-time equivalent employees for establishing the process to resolve roughly 300 contentions against the license.
Time will tell if this is sufficient funding to restart the license application the Barack Obama administration halted in 2010, but Yucca proponents inside the Capital Beltway were cheering the request this week, notably Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.): the House of Representatives’ de-facto dean of Yucca Mountain.
The administration’s proposal is “a key step toward fixing our nation’s broken nuclear waste management policy,” Shimkus said in a statement emailed to Weapons Complex Monitor.
Shimkus has beaten the drum hard to restart the Energy Department’s application to license Yucca Mountain as a repository for the last four of his 11 terms in the House. The Illinois GOPer is the architect of draft legislation that would broadly increase the federal government’s power to begin licensing the facility with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and construct the facility in Nye County, over the objections of the Silver State.
The draft bill, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, has not yet been scheduled for a markup in the House.
Meanwhile, Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) slammed the proposal as anti-Nevada.
“Yucca Mountain is dead,” Heller wrote in a scalding statement posted to his website. “[I]t’s a failed proposal that has already wasted billions of taxpayer dollars and is overwhelmingly rejected by Nevadans. It’s time the Administration move on from the Yucca debate and turn its focus to a viable solution to the country’s nuclear waste problem.”
Heller, one of 52 GOP senators in Congress, is up for re-election in 2018. His unwavering opposition to Yucca mountain puts him in conflict with at least part of President Trump’s legislative agenda.
Of the $120 million designated for Yucca and interim storage in DOE’s 2018 budget, about $10 million would go to Nevada and native tribes in the state “to conduct appropriate activities and participate in licensing activities” for Yucca Mountain, DOE wrote in a budget document released Tuesday.
Industry has so far stayed quiet about the administration’s planned budget request. AECOM, the lead on Yucca Mountain management and operations contractor USA Repository Services, did not reply to a request for comment this week, though there was earlier this year some movement to get out in front of the Trump administration’s plans.
In April, USA Repository Services partner AREVA Federal Services put out a call in an internal company newsletter for engineers interested in joining the AECOM-led partnership.
In the meantime, there is no Yucca Mountain funding of any sort in the federal government’s current budget — and Congress will be in session for only about a month-and-a-half between Friday and the end of the 2017 fiscal year on Sept. 30. If Congress cannot pass a budget Trump would sign in that window, lawmakers will have to approve another stopgap spending measure that would postpone the Yucca restart yet again.
