Yucca Mountain, nuclear waste site and longtime political quagmire, back on the menu for some in Congress

BENJAMIN S. WEISS / Courthouse News Service
Published on April 10, 2024

FILE - In this July 14, 2018, file photo, people leave the south portal of Yucca Mountain during a congressional tour near Mercury, Nev. President Donald Trump appears to have reversed position to now oppose creating a national nuclear waste dump at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Trump tweeted Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, that his administration will respect the state, which has argued that the site about 100 miles from Las Vegas isn't suitable. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

WASHINGTON (CN) — With other efforts to find a willing host for U.S. nuclear waste stockpiles on ice, lawmakers in Washington appear to be turning once again to a familiar project long considered a political nonstarter — Nevada’s Yucca Mountain repository.

“I’ve stood on top of that mountain,” said South Carolina Representative Jeff Duncan during a hearing Wednesday in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “If we can’t put all the nuclear waste in the nation here, we’re not going to be able to put it anywhere.”

Located in Nye County just west of Las Vegas, Yucca Mountain was designated by Congress in the 1980s to be one of two future locations to permanently store the thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel generated by the U.S. reactor fleet.

The project was laid out in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, a measure infamously deemed the ‘Screw Nevada Bill’ by the Silver State’s congressional delegation.

Decades of political pressure from Nevada lawmakers eventually saw Yucca Mountain put in suspended animation in 2010, when then-President Barack Obama pulled the proposed repository’s funding. Despite an attempt by the Trump administration to restart the project, Yucca Mountain has remained little more than a hole in the ground for more than a decade.

The Biden administration has so far refused to fund the site.

Without Yucca Mountain, the U.S. has no location to consolidate all the spent nuclear fuel currently stranded at nuclear power plants across the country, and the government for years footed the bill for keeping the waste safe and secure.

In recent years, the federal government — and private industry — have worked to finally close the nuclear fuel cycle, but to little avail.

The Fifth Circuit last week struck down the second of two federal licenses granted by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to a pair of companies looking to build short-term spent fuel storage facilities in New Mexico and Texas.

Known as consolidated interim storage facilities, the proposed sites would have held onto the country’s waste inventory until a permanent repository was opened. The Fifth Circuit, however, ruled that federal law did not give NRC the authority to approve privately owned spent fuel sites located away from the reactor that generated the waste.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy has been working on what it calls a “consent-based siting” program, which they say would offer maximum stakeholder involvement in selecting a location for a spent fuel repository. However, the agency has yet to announce any prospective hosts for such a site.

On Wednesday, lawmakers seemed to look back fondly on the mothballed Yucca Mountain project, arguing the U.S. needs to move ahead with some sort of repository if it plans to build more nuclear reactors as part of a clean energy push.

Colorado Representative Diana DeGette, who said she had also visited Yucca Mountain, noted that she found the site to be “pretty remote” but acknowledged that it had never been finished thanks to “political winds on both sides in Washington.”

“I think that’s a shame,” she said.

Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington state Republican who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee, called the move to stall Yucca Mountain “unfortunate” and has “undermined the law and poisoned public trust and how we manage spent nuclear fuel for far too long.”

Rodgers argued the opposition to the Yucca Mountain site, particularly from Nevada, is not rooted in safety or technical concerns.

“This program has inhibited congressional appropriations and driven the executive branch to dismantle what is otherwise a technically successful program,” she said.

Efforts to restart the Yucca Mountain project in 2018, which cleared the House but failed in the Senate, demonstrate that “it is possible to build bipartisan support” for a nuclear waste repository, Rodgers said, and Congress should update federal law and build state consensus for such a facility in Nevada.

Several of the witnesses invited to testify Wednesday concurred, contending that finishing the Yucca Mountain project would lay the groundwork for successful nuclear waste management in the U.S.

“If progress is made on licensing a permanent repository, it should be much easier than to sire consolidated interim storage,” said Greg White, executive director of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

White added that Congress should consider handing control of U.S. spent fuel management activities to a new, single-purpose organization rather than leaving it to the Energy Department.

“If implemented in the near term, these steps create a solid foundation on which to build a viable spent fuel management program,” he said.

Lake Barrett, former principal deputy director of the Energy Department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said the country needs a nuclear waste repository “under any circumstances” if it hopes to build new nuclear reactors.

While he said he hoped the “politically blocked” Yucca Mountain project would be unfrozen, Barrett acknowledged that there was no evidence the hold would be lifted any time soon. Instead, he said, the U.S. should start looking for other repository sites.

“The original [Nuclear Waste Policy] Act had two repositories, so let’s start that process,” he said, adding that he believed the Energy Department’s current effort to site an interim storage facility would hinge on the existence of a serious candidate for a permanent repository.

“Without that,” he said, “I can’t see any state accepting interim storage for everybody else’s waste around the country.”

While some lawmakers appeared warmer Wednesday to the Yucca Mountain site, it’s unlikely that the project would be restarted in due course. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has repeatedly said that the Biden administration does not support a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain — and Nevada’s congressional delegation remains ardently opposed to the site.