The negotiations to pass a fiscal 2018 spending bill this month include a quiet effort by a Republican lawmaker from Illinois to restart plans to store the nation’s nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
There are no nuclear power plants in Rep. John Shimkus’s district in the southeastern region of the state. But the long-decommissioned Zion nuclear plant in northern Illinois is home to stored waste that Shimkus said would be better off moved to Yucca Mountain, which the federal government chose three decades ago to serve as the repository for all of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel.
“It’s fenced and guarded, it’s on Lake Michigan, and the city can’t develop that site,” Shimkus said of the closed Zion plant.
Many other closed or soon-to-be-decommissioned sites need a permanent place to store nuclear waste, as do active nuclear plants that could be forced to close due to a lack of safe disposal space.
“Science says long-term, geological storage is the safest way,” Shimkus, a longtime proponent of opening the Yucca storage site, said.
Yucca Mountain is the nation’s only approved geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste.
The site, located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was chosen by the Department of Energy to eventually store spent fuel from nuclear power plants, U.S. Navy reactors, and waste generated from building nuclear weapons.
But opposition from the Silver State has stalled the three-decade effort to develop the Yucca site.
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., deserves much of the credit for stopping the project by using his position in the Senate and his alliance with the Obama administration to block funding and stack the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with Yucca opponents.
With Congress and the White House under GOP control, Shimkus is now urging Senate GOP leaders to include in the fiscal 2018 omnibus spending package an additional $150 million that would be used to revive the licensing process for the Yucca Mountain site.
The omnibus is likely to hit the House and Senate floors for a vote in the days before March 23, when a temporary spending bill expires.
Shimkus’ request aligns with President Trump, who in both his 2018 and 2019 budget request included $120 million for the Department of Energy to begin reviving the stalled Yucca licensing process.
The House added $30 million for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which had largely closed down Yucca licensing activities under the Obama administration.
Shimkus said reviving Yucca would involve an NRC adjudication of Nevada’s arguments that using Yucca to store nuclear waste is unsafe and would put the state’s residents at risk.
The state’s argument counters a five-volume, 2015 NRC safety evaluation report that determined Yucca Mountain could safely store spent nuclear fuel.
“Part of the main contention of Nevadans is the science is not sound,” Shimkus said. “This money complies with the law. It says, let’s have the debate. If opponents are right on the science, then Yucca can’t happen.”
But Shimkus is up against bipartisan opposition from the Senate’s Nevada delegation, which could hobble efforts to pass the omnibus and keep the government fully operational.
Election year politics make the issue even more complicated. Sen. Dean Heller, Nevada’s sole Republican senator, is the most vulnerable GOP lawmaker up for re-election in November.
He is staunchly opposed to reviving the Yucca Mountain storage project and called the funding proposal “reckless.”
This year, the Senate stripped out the $150 million for the DOE and NRC from its own energy appropriations measure.
The final decision on whether to add it back in to the omnibus will be largely up to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is known to fiercely protect his vulnerable incumbents.
Shimkus is not discouraged and said he’s been told that the spending bill remains open for possible additions, including the money for reviving the Yucca Mountain storage site.
“I’m not going to predict in the end it will be in there, but I’d rather the omnibus not be closed, with an opportunity,” Shimkus said. “People have listened to my argument. And they’ve said there is a lot of merit to it. It’s taken a lot of education. That’s good. It’s all positive.”
