Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette sought to reassure Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto on Tuesday that the Department of Energy plans to seek alternatives to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, but he stopped short of backing an effort to change the law designating the site for a national repository.

At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing Tuesday on the DOE budget, Cortez Masto, who opposes the project, asked Brouillette what DOE would do if Congress provided funds for the Yucca project in the current fiscal year.

‘We will follow the law, obviously, but it’s our intent to look for alternatives to Yucca Mountain,” Brouillette said. “It’s our intent to begin a process, and that’s why we’ve requested $27.5 million in the budget, to do a few things.” ……

Cortez Masto also pressed Brouillette about whether he would support a repeal of the 1987 law that designated the Yucca the spot for the nation to bury its nuclear waste. …..

At a House hearing last week, Brouillette said the administration currently has no plans to change the law even though it would be needed to implement storing waste at temporary sites, which is something DOE has said it could explore……

After seeking funds for the project in his first three budgets, President Donald Trump reversed course in the fiscal 2021 budget blueprint and in a tweet last month said he heard Nevadans on the issue of Yucca. Most Nevada lawmakers and business interest groups oppose the project’s proposed site, which is located about 90 miles from Las Vegas.

Following the release of the budget, Gov. Steve Sisolak, who was in Washington for the annual National Governors Association winter meeting, hand-delivered a letter to the White House calling on Trump to pledge to veto legislation that would advance the Yucca project and “undermine the State’s legal standing or consent requirements.”

The White House has not yet responded according to Sisolak’s office……..

Trump’s decision on Yucca also comes as he looks to win Nevada in his 2020 re-election bid. He lost the state to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by two points.

After the hearing, Murkowski said she welcomed the president’s budget request dropping funds for Yucca because it would allow Congress to focus on advancing legislation to authorize temporary nuclear waste storage rather than expending energy on the Gordian knot that is Yucca.

“We think we have an opportunity to move on our interim waste bill,” Murkowski said. “I always thought that was a path that we needed to pursue as well. And so I think this gives us an opportunity and an opening.”

The energy secretary also said that DOE remains on track for removing the half metric-ton of weapons-grade plutonium the agency secretly shipped to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) from the Savannah River site in South Carolina.

In April, Cortez Masto struck a deal with then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry to remove the plutonium beginning in 2021 and getting all of it out by 2026. The DOE disclosed in January 2019 as part of a lawsuit filed by the state to prevent any plutonium shipment—after talks with DOE yielded no resolution—that it had already shipped the plutonium. ……. https://lccentral.com/2020/03/13/cortez-masto-presses-doe-secretary-on-plan-to-seek-yucca-alternatives/