House passes bill to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain

Published 3:19 pm Thursday, May 10, 2018

Oregon Rep. Greg Walden touted the U.S. House passage of legislation to place nuclear waste from Hanford and the rest of the nation in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

Walden, a Republican from Hood River running for re-election, chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It passed the bill on a 49-4 vote last summer. Thursday morning the full House voted 340-72 for the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act.

Decaying and leaking containers holding 56 million gallons of radioactive waste at the Hanford site have long worried Columbia River communities, Walden said during a phone conference following the vote.

The bill re-ignites a plan that stalled in the former administration to direct the U.S. Department of Energy to establish interim storage sites for nuclear waste while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives its stamp of approval to open Yucca Mountain. The Energy Department’s $31 billion proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year includes $110 million for the NRC to license Yucca as the nuclear waste repository.

Certifying the Yucca site for safe storage will take years alone, Walden said, and the program, including the transmutation of the waste into glass rods, is basically a long-term, giant infrastructure project with a cost of $100 billion over the span of 100 years. In some ways, he said, this would be akin to the U.S. Army’s program to incinerate old chemical weapons at the former Umatilla Chemical Depot.

And American consumers already have been paying for the project, he added.

Congress promised years ago to use $40 billion from electricity users nationwide to establish a permanent storage site for the waste, Walden said, and $160 million came from Oregonians. Congress instead spent the money on other projects, he said, with little to show for it.

“This is all part of cleaning up from past activities,” Walden said. “And it’s our obligation to get that done.”

Passage in the Senate still could be a hurdle. Both of Nevada’s senators oppose the plan. No one wants nuclear waste in their backyard, Walden said, but Hanford is one of 121 nuclear waste storage sites in 39 states, so putting the material in one safe site makes the nation more secure. And winning with wide bipartisan support in the House could help.

“That was part of our strategy,” Walden said, “to get a big vote in the House so we would send a really strong message to the Senate.”

Walden said he doesn’t expect the Senate to take any action on the bill, however, until after the November election.