A bipartisan quartet of senators is floating a proposal for storing the nation’s nuclear waste in places other than Yucca Mountain, the planned Nevada repository that has been in political crosshairs for decades.
The legislation was introduced last session and largely mirrors the recommendations from the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, an expert panel convened by President Obama in 2010. The bill introduced Tuesday calls for moving the nation’s nuclear waste to interim storage sites, requiring permanent waste dumps to be self-selected by governments willing to host spent fuel and establishes an independent agency to oversee nuclear waste disposal.
“If we want to continue to have low-cost, clean power from nuclear reactors, which today produces about 60 percent of our country’s emission-free electricity, then we have to have a place to put the used nuclear fuel. That means we need to end the stalemate over what to do with our country’s nuclear waste by finding a way to create both temporary and permanent storage sites that would complement other solutions,” said bill co-sponsor Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who heads the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The bill’s other co-sponsors include Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who is the ranking member of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee. Cantwell is the only new co-sponsor from the version introduced last session.
The bill, as well as the Blue Ribbon Commission report, are designed to get around the political stalemate over Yucca. Obama pulled the plug on Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviews of the site in 2009 to keep a campaign promise to now-Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who is a fierce opponent of the project.
The legislation comes as Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who participated in the Blue Ribbon Commission before he led the Energy Department, gave a speech on nuclear waste at a Washington event hosted by nonpartisan think tank the Bipartisan Policy Center.
While the legislation is silent on Yucca, House Republicans have maintained that under federal law the Nevada site must be assessed for whether it can permanently store the nation’s nuclear waste that is currently piling up at commercial reactors across the country.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in January that Yucca could safely store nuclear waste, which supporters of the site said took away opponents’ arguments to keep the project shuttered. But Congress still would need to pass legislation to transfer the land to the Energy Department to build the site — which Reid is hell-bent on preventing — and the department also doesn’t possess water rights at Yucca, which is tied up in litigation.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, however, has said it doesn’t have enough money to finish the licensing process for Yucca. Republicans have tried to send the agency more money in the past, but Democrats have blocked it.
Co-sponsors of the Yucca alternative legislation said the nation can’t wait any longer. It noted that customers of electric utilities have yet to benefit from the $36 billion in fees they have paid — until a federal court last year stopped the Energy Department from collecting them — to build an eventual permanent repository.
“The United States desperately needs a comprehensive nuclear waste policy. We simply cannot allow spent nuclear fuel to remain indefinitely at sites scattered throughout the country, stored at taxpayer expense, awaiting a clear path forward,” Feinstein said.
