Energy Secretary Rick Perry was in the hot seat Wednesday as senators grilled him over his push to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the fight over making Yucca the sole location for the nation’s nuclear waste had slowed progress on the issue and questioned Perry on interim sites.
“There’s no place for the waste to go,” she said at the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the Energy Department’s fiscal 2018 budget request. “Yucca holds everything hostage.”
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He added that there is a possibility that nuclear waste could be stored at a private storage facility while the construction on the Yucca site is finished. He called it a “viable” option and defended his push for the Yucca project.
The DOE’s 2018 budget plan is a 5.6 percent reduction from the 2017 budget, but devotes $120 million to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
The money would be used to restart the licensing process for the site, which Congress in 1987 designated the nation’s sole nuclear waste repository.
The Obama administration halted the licensing process but Republicans are eager to resume the work. The state of Nevada has long opposed the project.
Perry was also questioned on the Trump budget’s commitment to nuclear cleanup by Democrats.
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Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) cited a tunnel collapse at the Hanford nuclear waste site in Washington state in May 2017 that has still not been cleaned up.
“The federal government has a moral and a legal obligation to clean up that waste site,” she said, but called President Trump’s budget “inadequate” and “short-sighted” on providing funds for Hanford.
Murray said the budget cut costs at the expense of safety.
“This is not a simple project,” she said. “There is absolutely no cheap way to do this.”
Perry said that Hanford could be one of the longest-lasting projects of his time as secretary and that he would work to ensure that the people of Washington state knew he was committed to cleaning up that site.
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