President Donald Trump on Aug. 13 signed the $717 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2019, accepting its prohibition on funding for disposal of defense nuclear waste.
The final bill is another setback to the Trump administration’s efforts to revive plans for a radioactive waste repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. However, state officials say they are gearing up to oppose an anticipated renewed push from Washington in early 2019.
“We’re going to take the fight to them. I don’t want to play defense anymore in this, so wherever we have an opportunity we’re going to take it to them,” Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) said last week.
The U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year authorized $30 million for defense nuclear waste disposal in its NDAA, specifically for Yucca Mountain and interim storage. The Senate zeroed out that line item in its version of the military policy bill, and the upper chamber had its way in the compromise legislation sent to the White House on Aug. 1.
Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) touted his ability to persuade his colleagues to prohibit funding for Yucca Mountain, as he has regularly throughout Congress’ appropriations and NDAA processes for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
“The U.S. House of Representatives tried to use the defense bill as a vehicle to jumpstart Yucca Mountain, but I wouldn’t let that happen,” the lawmaker said in a prepared statement on Aug. 13. “I was proud to work with Chairman McCain and Senator Inhofe of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services to keep $30 million to revive Yucca Mountain out of the defense bill that the U.S. Senate passed as well as the version that we ultimately sent to the President’s desk for his signature.”
Heller is locked in a tight re-election campaign against Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.). Nevada’s congressional delegation uniformly opposes using Yucca Mountain for disposal of tens of thousands of tons of waste, though Heller is perhaps the most vocal.
Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain as the final resting place for spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power reactors (now around 80,000 metric tons) and a smaller amount of high-level waste from the government’s defense nuclear operations (roughly 14,000 metric tons). The program made little headway over the decades before being canceled by the Obama administration in favor of a “consent-based” approach for disposal.
The Trump administration for both the current fiscal 2018 and upcoming fiscal 2019 has requested funding to resume the Department of Energy license application for the Nevada repository before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The latest White House budget request would provide nearly $170 million for the effort, $120 million for DOE and the rest for the NRC. The House went above and beyond that by approving $270 million in its energy appropriations, while the Senate offered nothing for Yucca Mountain. The two chambers have not yet begun working on a compromise appropriations bill, though Politico quoted Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) as saying Wednesday that negotiations could begin after Labor Day.
During an Aug. 14 meeting of the Nevada Board of Examiners, Sandoval and other state officials said the next battle will brew in the new year.
“We’re reading the tea leaves. It certainly looks like these fools want another fight with Nevada and we’re ready to give it to them,” Robert Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, told RadWaste Monitor.
Scuttlebutt among informed sources around Washington is that Congress by next month will pass another short-term budget covering the first three months of fiscal 2019, keeping the federal government running past the November midterm election and through the end of the year, according to Halstead, Nevada’s point man against Yucca Mountain.
But another continuing resolution crafted after Election Day could open the door for funding for the disposal site, particularly if Heller is re-elected and the GOP retains its majority in the Senate, Halstead said in a telephone interview. Common wisdom has been that at least part of the upper chamber’s antipathy to the project in recent years has been based on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) opposition to any move that could harm Heller politically and endanger the Republican Party’s particularly thin 51-49 edge.
With their majority safe for another couple years, Senate Republicans might also feel safe in taking up House legislation intended to strengthen the federal government’s ability to build the Yucca Mountain facility. Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act passed out of the lower chamber in May on a 340-72 vote but has not yet been taken up in the Senate.
Halstead, though, laid out a more complex potential sequence of events: The Senate uses the Shimkus bill as the vehicle for crafting new radioactive waste disposal authorizing legislation. The upper chamber’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee strips out most of the original language, effectively replacing it with a revised measure based on the Nuclear Waste Administration Act from 2015.
That bill, spearheaded by Alexander, would have established an independent agency to oversee a “consensual process … for centralized storage of nuclear waste pending completion of a repository.” It never made it out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but Alexander has repeatedly discussed introducing the bill again.
Should that come to pass, Halstead said, Nevada’s congressional delegation would refile the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, submitted this year in both chambers by Heller and Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.). That bill, also trapped in committee, would require approval from a state governor, all impacted local jurisdictions, and all impacted Native American tribes in siting a nuclear waste repository.
A spokesman for Alexander did not respond to a request for comment on the matter this week. A spokesman for Shimkus said he had not heard any rumors of wholesale revisions to the lawmaker’s bill. He said it is up to the Senate to decide its schedule for considering the legislation, but that Shimkus has urged quick action.
Whatever might be developing in Washington, Nevada officials are not sitting still.
During its meeting, the Board of Examiners signed off on a one-year, $150,000 contract extension for Marta Adams, a former senior attorney in the state Attorney General’s Office who is private practice is continuing to aid Nevada’s government in battling Yucca Mountain. The extension brings the total contract value to $600,000 through Sept. 30, 2019. It covers “ongoing services to advance Nevaa’s Yucca Mountain legal efforts, including the state’s participation in U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licening proceedings and other Yucca Mountain litgation,” along with other related oversight duties.
The state’s 30-person anti-Yucca team is also adding new information to the 218 technical contentions that were filed with the NRC against DOE’s license application for Yucca Mountain before the Obama administration suspended proceedings in 2010. Another 30 contentions would be ready for submittal within 30 days of a vote by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to lift the suspension, Halstead said.
Five state and federal lawsuits against the project, currently in “abeyance,” could also be revived as needed, he said.
Addressing the board by video, Sandoval noted he has about four months left in office but remains passionate in his opposition to Yucca Mountain: “So whatever we can do between now and then let’s continue to slug ‘em in the stomach and pop ‘em between the eyes.”
LSNARP Chairman Resigns
Separately, Andrew Bates on Tuesday resigned as chairman of the NRC’s Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel (LSNARP).
The panel was established to oversee management of the Licensing Support Network, a searchable database of what was nearly 3.7 million documents related to the NRC adjudication of the Yucca Mountain license application. The LSN was retired in 2011 and its documents transferred to the agency’s ADAMS online document system.
The LNSARP has been reviewing options for reviving the system should the adjudication resume, but no final decisions have been made.
Bates’ resignation followed his retirement last year from the NRC Office of the Secretary, an agency spokesman said. “It has been an honor to have served as Chairman of the panel since 2000 and I look forward to seeing the decisions the Commission makes should funding for the High-Level Waste Proceeding become available through future Congressional appropriations,” Bates wrote in a brief resignation notice to Annette Vietti-Cook, secretary for the commission.
On Wednesday, Vietti-Cook appointed Russell Chazell, NRC assistant for rulemakings and adjudications in the Office of the Secretary, as the new LSNARP chairman. Chazell has been with the NRC since 2009, serving in various positions including legal counsel to then-Chairman Stephen Burns and acting head of the projects branch in the Division of License Renewal.
