As reported by Bloomberg Environment:
Posted May 21, 2019, 7:40 PM
The House Appropriations Committee on May 21 advanced a fiscal 2020 spending bill for the Energy Department, Army Corps of Engineers, and other agencies on a nearly straight party-line 31-21 vote.
The bill would provide $46.4 billion in discretionary funds, a $1.8 billion increase over fiscal 2019. The Energy Department would receive $37.1 billion, a $1.4 billion increase.
The measure now moves to the full House, whose Democratic leaders may be forced to re-fight a battle waged in committee over high-level nuclear waste storage in Nevada.
Nearly all of the Republicans on the Appropriations Committee voted for an amendment that would have given more than $26 million to the Energy Department to resume its licensing process for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
Four Democrats—Reps. Cheri Bustos (Ill.), Derek Kilmer (Wash.), Betty McCollum (Minn.), and Peter Visclosky (Ind.)—voted for the amendment, even though the committee’s Democratic leaders urged members of their caucus not to do so.
The amendment, introduced by Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), ultimately failed on a 25-27 vote. Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) joined all other Democrats in voting “no” and Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) did not attend the committee’s May 21 markup.
The surprisingly close vote illustrates just how contentious the issue of Yucca Mountain is in Congress. Nuclear energy officials have for years said the Nevada location is the best place for permanent storage of the country’s radioactive waste, but residents of Nevada, their representatives in Congress, and many others—including the state’s powerful gambling industry—have fiercely opposed this.
“The latest attempt to force nuclear waste down Nevada’s throat has failed, and I won’t stop fighting until we put an end to Yucca Mountain once and for all,” Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) said in a statement after the committee’s vote.
While multiple presidential administrations struggled to determine whether to move forward with the Yucca Mountain site, spent fuel has been piling up at many nuclear power plants across the country. Simpson said 48 of the 53 members of the Appropriations Committee have some nuclear waste being stored indefinitely within their districts.
“They’re voting to leave waste in their districts,” he told Bloomberg Environment. “That’s what they want to do.”
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), chair of the Appropriations subcommittee that handles the Department of Energy’s annual budget, said allocating money to the stalled Yucca project would be counterproductive to the preferred Democratic solution to this problem, which is to ship the nuclear waste to several interim storage sites rather than sending it all to one site.
“We have a better idea,” she said. “The path that we are proposing helps us get waste out of districts sooner.”
The fiscal 2020 spending bill also rejects the Trump administration’s proposals to eliminate funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and the department’s loan guarantee programs; sell off the transmission assets of the four federal power marketing administrations (PMAs); and modify the laws governing the rates PMAs charge for electricity.
The measure would appropriate $7.36 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers, $357 million more than in fiscal 2019 and $2.53 billion more than the request.
Interior Department agencies would receive $1.65 billion under the bill. Almost all of that amount would go to the Bureau of Reclamation, which is responsible for maintaining federal water and hydropower projects in the West.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Schultz in Washington at dschultz@bloombergenvironment.com
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory Henderson at ghenderson@bloombergenvironment.com; Chuck McCutcheon at cmccutcheon@bloombergenvironment.com