Energy secretary nominee Chris Wright during his confirmation hearing. (Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee screengrab)
“Can Nevadans count on you to acknowledge that the failed Yucca Mountain project is unworkable,” Nevada Democratic Sen Catherine Cortez Masto asked Chris Wright, Donald Trump’s nominee to be energy secretary, during Wright’s Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday.
Wright stopped short of acknowledging the nuclear waste dump is unworkable, instead saying that if building “large infrastructure” then “you need to have on board the local community.”
So Cortez Masto repeated the question.
And again Wright failed to answer the question directly, saying instead he would work with Cortez Masto and senators from across the country “to find solutions for long-term disposal of nuclear waste,” and “a central part of that is going to be local buy-in on the project.”
“He refused to condemn nuclear storage at Yucca Mountain or acknowledge the project is dead,” Cortez Masto said in a statement released by her office after the hearing.
Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the Trump administration prepared by organizations allied with Trump, does not think the Yucca Mountain project is, as Cortez Masto phrased it, “unworkable.”
“Yucca Mountain,” according to Project 2025’s section on energy, “remains a viable option for waste management, and DOE should recommit to working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as it reviews DOE’s permit application for a repository.”
Wright, who is the CEO of a Colorado fracking company, also serves on the board of OKLO, a firm hoping to develop commercial small nuclear power reactors.
Yucca Mountain was officially designated as the nation’s nuclear waste “repository” during the administration of George W. Bush, in 2002. But the project was the subject of legal and regulatory proceedings for the next several years, until the administration of Barack Obama ordered the DOE to discontinue its licensing application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and eliminated federal funding for the project.
While president, Trump attempted to restart funding for Yucca, but was thwarted by Congress. Trump reversed positions during the 2022 campaign cycle in an effort to help Adam Laxalt, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate who lost to Cortez Masto that year.
The Biden administration never included funding for the Yucca Mountain project.
Cortez Masto also on Wednesday announced that she and every other Democrat in the Nevada congressional delegation are co-sponsoring reintroduction of a bill that would prevent construction of a nuclear waste dump anywhere in the U.S. without the DOE first getting written consent from the state’s governor and “affected” local governments and tribes.
Wright is expected to be confirmed by the Republican controlled Senate.