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Despite support from Trump, political opposition dims Yucca Mountain prospects

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Despite support from Trump, political opposition dims Yucca Mountain prospects

The Trump administration's hopes of restarting licensing on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository are meeting resistance from Congress despite bipartisan support for the project in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry testified March 15 before the House Appropriations Committee's energy, water development and related agencies subcommittee on the U.S. Department of Energy's fiscal-year 2019 budget request.

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Energy Secretary Rick Perry appears at a hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee on March 15.
Source: Associated Press

As with the White House's fiscal-year 2018 request, the proposal included $120 million for work related to the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada. The Obama administration halted the initiative in response to concerns about the possible environmental impacts even though utility customers have paid roughly $40 billion for a long-term storage site under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

"The law clearly requires the Department of Energy to go through with this licensing process," Perry said at the March 15 hearing.

The head of the subcommittee also backed the DOE's call to restart Yucca Mountain. "Having the administration support current law is refreshing and hopefully it will help us move past the legislative stalemate with the Senate the past several years," Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said at the hearing.

But Simpson gave no firm commitments that the subcommittee will add funding for Yucca either in its upcoming spending bill for the rest of the 2018 fiscal year or in future appropriations measures. And in 2017, the Senate Appropriations Committee excluded money for Yucca Mountain in its fiscal-year 2018 spending bill, with Nevada Senators Dean Heller and Catherine Cortez-Masto strongly opposed to the project.

The resistance is "political more than it is anything else," Simpson told reporters after the hearing. He suggested that if Congress and the administration do not resolve the fate of Yucca Mountain as part of the fiscal-year 2019 budget process, they "won't for a long, long time."

Separate legislation to restart the project also faces an unclear future. The House Energy and Commerce Committee in June 2017 approved a bill from U.S. Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., that would restart Yucca Mountain licensing while authorizing storage at private sites and allowing the DOE to pursue an interim storage program. The committee passed the bill by a wide margin of 49-4.

But despite the bipartisan support, the full House has yet to schedule a vote for the bill amid uncertainty over appropriations. Even though the government already has collected fees for Yucca Mountain from utility ratepayers, Congress must distribute the funds and has not done so since the Obama administration put the brakes on the project.

While Shimkus' legislation could pave the way for the DOE to resume work on Yucca Mountain, Perry stopped short of endorsing the proposal. When asked by Simpson if he supported the bill, Perry said, "I'll leave that to those of you with great talent at being able to negotiate those bills."

The energy secretary made similar comments to House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., telling her he would "dutifully follow" Congress' instructions with respect to Yucca Mountain even though the DOE has a "moral responsibility" to permanently store the country's nuclear waste.

Lawmakers probe ARPA-E, renewable cuts

Legislators also questioned Perry on the DOE's proposals to cut funding for renewable energy research and terminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, known as ARPA-E.

Subcommittee Ranking Member Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, noted that the Trump administration wants a 67% spending reduction for the DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, including a 74% drop for energy storage research, at the same time as China and other countries are ramping up investment in advanced and clean energy technologies.

Perry said the decision to seek less money for renewable energy does not mean those resources have "fallen out of favor." Rather, the DOE's success in cutting costs for those technologies means the agency is "re-prioritizing where these dollars need to go," he added.

But Kaptur said other countries are outpacing U.S. spending on renewable energy, which could put the nation at a competitive disadvantage. "We've reached certain thresholds, but we certainly haven't maximized what we know in these energy arenas," she told Perry.

With respect to ARPA-E, Perry pledged to work with the committee on possible changes to the program and "honor and follow instructions" from Congress. But what those instructions will be remains unclear. Simpson told reporters he could not discuss what lawmakers will include in an upcoming budget for the rest of 2018, which he said should be released by March 19.

In a prior proposal for fiscal year 2018, the House Appropriations Committee proposed canceling ARPA-E, although Senate appropriators called for record high funding for the agency.