As we will discuss tomorrow at ECA webinar (registration here) "Planning for the Upcoming Congressional Year: How to Communicate Priorities" last week the House and Senate conferees finished and released the conference report on H.R. 2670. Under this agreement the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would authorize $886.3 billion towards defense programs. The NDAA is considered a must-pass bill, as it authorizes all defense activities from National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Environmental Management (EM) to pay raises to troops and weapons system procurement.

This discretionary total would include about $842.2 billion for the U.S. Department of Defense and $32.3 billion for the Department of Energy (DOE). The NDAA is crucial for defense as it controls everything, but it also is crucial to the authorization of energy-related national security programs. The NDAA includes authorizations for NNSA, EM defense cleanup up, and Office of Legacy Management, among others.

The conference report would authorize the following amounts for various DOE-related national security programs:

$24.05 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA);

$7.04 billion for defense environmental cleanup;

$196 million for the Office of Legacy Management (LM);

$160 million for nuclear energy.

In NNSA’s $24.05 billion authorizes: over $2.6 Billion for Plutonium Pit Production Mission ($1.76 billion for Los Alamos Plutonium Modernization; and almost $921 million for Savannah River Plutonium Modernization.)

The $7.04 billion for defense environmental cleanup would authorize: $921 million for the Hanford site; $447 million for the Idaho National Laboratory (INL); $1.9 million for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL); $61.95 million for the Nevada Test Site; $273.8 million for Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL); $505 million for Oak Ridge; $1.58 billion for Savannah River Site (SRS); and $464.3 million for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).

This NDAA would authorize new plant projects, such as the Naval Reactors Facility Medical Science Complex in Idaho Falls ($36.5 million); Plutonium Production Building ($48.5 million) and Protective Force Facility ($48.5 million) at LANL; and Z-Pinch Experimental Underground System Test Bed Facilities Improvement at the Nevada National Security Site ($80 million).

The report would also: prohibit expansion of the Advanced Recovery and Integrated Extraction Systems (ARIES) at LANL’s PF-4 plutonium facility until NNSA can certify to Congress that at least 30 plutonium pits can be produced per year; and direct DOE to establish a program that will increase the quantity of low-enriched uranium and high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) produced by domestic nuclear energy companies.

As of now, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) asked for cloture, which would end debate and lead to a vote on the adoption of the conference report. For this to happen Schumer would require the support 60 senators.

On the House side, they are scheduled to consider the compromise this week. For the conference report to pass a two-thirds majority is required.

The House and Senate passed their respective FY 2024 defense policy bills in July of 2023. The House passed H.R. 2670 on July 14 by 219-210 and the Senate passed S.2226 on July 27 by 86-11 vote, then amended H.R. 2670 with its language to set up a conference.

ECA will continue to provide updates as the conference report progresses through.

In the world of nuclear energy, no name is so storied as Oak Ridge, particularly to the companies and partners now making the city a center of what many have called a coming "nuclear renaissance."

Now, in the literal footprint and the proverbial shadow of the Manhattan Project, new nuclear companies hoping to accelerate the national transition to clean energy are coming to Oak Ridge and nearby Knoxville.

Created in 1942 as the first production site of the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge was the birthplace of the world's first continuously operating nuclear reactor and the Nuclear Navy, whose reactors are still fueled by Y-12 National Security Complex. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has built and operated 13 nuclear reactors that powered discoveries across its 80-year history, and one still operates today.

The phrase "nuclear renaissance" suggests a rebirth, and nuclear energy could be headed for a comeback as worries about carbon emissions and a dying coal sector spur historic federal investments in clean energy and the nation's electric grid faces mounting pressures from electric cars and artificial intelligence.

Nuclear has been feared and rejected in many quarters owing to disasters like those at Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima in 2011, which led several nations, most notably Germany, to phase out their nuclear power plants. Still, nuclear remains one of the safest and cleanest sources of power.

The phrase "nuclear renaissance" suggests a rebirth, and nuclear energy could be headed for a comeback as worries about carbon emissions and a dying coal sector spur historic federal investments in clean energy and the nation's electric grid faces mounting pressures from electric cars and artificial intelligence.

Nuclear has been feared and rejected in many quarters owing to disasters like those at Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima in 2011, which led several nations, most notably Germany, to phase out their nuclear power plants. Still, nuclear remains one of the safest and cleanest sources of power.

The United States is accelerating its move to nuclear as President Biden makes new nuclear power generation a key to his goal of a carbon-free U.S. power grid by 2035 and a net-zero emissions economy by 2050. Most Americans, about 57%, support building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, up from just 43% in 2020, according to Pew Research Center.

The U.S. is in a position to triple its nuclear energy output by 2050, from 100 gigawatts to 300 gigawatts, enough to power more than 200 million homes, according to a report from the Department of Energy in March. The growth would be driven by advanced nuclear technology such as small modular reactors so long as they are proven to be affordable enough to attract utility companies and private investors.

Work on advanced nuclear technology is accelerating in Knoxville and Oak Ridge, where partners like ORNL and the Tennessee Valley Authority are attracting private nuclear companies.

“We as a country sort of stepped away from nuclear for a period of time and so when people talk about the nuclear renaissance, I think they're referring to the hope that nuclear power generation will once again become an asset that more utilities are prepared to invest in,” Jeff Smith, former chief operating officer and interim director who is retiring from ORNL, told Knox News.

Smith sits on the Tennessee Nuclear Energy Advisory Council, created by Gov. Bill Lee in May alongside a $50 million nuclear fund to make the state a national name in the clean energy transition.

Lee didn't make the announcement just anywhere or with any crowd. He signed the executive order at the Zeanah Engineering Complex, the sleek home of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's highly ranked nuclear engineering department, surrounded by Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon, UT System President Randy Boyd and TVA chief operating officer Don Moul.

The small ceremony was a clear signal that Tennessee's road to the nuclear renaissance runs through Knoxville and Oak Ridge, which together are home to more than two-thirds of all nuclear companies in the state.

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You may have thought the movie Oppenheimer would be the only blockbuster involving Los Alamos, New Mexico this year.  But now EPA has invoked its rarely used Residual Designation Authority under section 402 of the Clean Water Act based on the determination that discharges from Los Alamos municipal storm sewers (and some, but not others, in New Mexico) to “relatively permanent” tributaries of the Rio Grande River result in exceedances of the New Mexico Water Quality Standards for certain “pollutants” in the River so that they should be subject to the prohibitions/permitting requirements of section 402 even though those municipal storm sewer systems were sufficiently small that they would not otherwise be covered by the NPDES provisions of the Clean Water Act.

The designation, which will now be published in the Federal Register, subject to public comment, and then undoubtedly the subject of more Federal court litigation, was already challenged in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.  EPA asked for, and was granted, a voluntary remand of that challenge so that it could consider the effect of the Supreme Court's decision in Hawaii Wildlife Fund v. Maui on its exercise of its Residual Designation Authority in New Mexico.

How rare is the exercise of that authority?  By my count it has been exercised three times. The first time was in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Perhaps not coincidentally, there are only three United States in which the State has not been authorized to implement the NPDES program.  Two of those states are Massachusetts and New Mexico.

As in New Mexico, the exercise of Residual Designation Authority in Massachusetts was also precipitated by an NGO.  But in Massachusetts the NGO sued anyway.  That litigation is also stayed, by a Federal District Court Judge, while EPA Region 1 decides what to do about the designation that it has already made in Massachusetts.

Back to New Mexico, I said EPA asked for a remand so that it could consider the effect of the Maui decision on its intended exercise of its section 402 authority.  It has now concluded Maui has no effect on that authority respecting the New Mexico discharges because the New Mexico discharges are direct to a Water of the United States, those "relatively permanent tributaries" I mentioned, so Maui's functional equivalence doctrine doesn't apply at all.  Of course the conclusion that a “relatively permanent tributary” is a Water of the United States is a factual one based on EPA's interpretation of the Supreme Court's most recent interpretation of the Clean Water Act earlier this year in Sackett v. EPA.   

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