ANS Public Policy Engagement

A subcommittee markup of the House energy and water fiscal year 2025 appropriations bill is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. (EDT) today. The appropriations package would fund energy and water development and related agencies through Sept. 30, 2025.

“I’m proud that [the bill] continues to build off the work of our FY 2024 bill to strengthen America’s strategic nuclear stockpile, revitalize our ability to enrich uranium domestically, invest in our long-term energy security, and maintain our country’s ports and inland waterways,” said Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R., Tenn.), chair of the energy subcommittee.

Dutton

The only nuclear reactor in Australia is a small one in the Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights, which has been used to produce medical radioisotopes since 1958. Recently, the Hon. Peter Dutton, Parliament’s leader of the opposition to the Labor-led government, announced his plan to get the country into the nuclear energy business by building five large reactors and two small modular reactors by 2050.

Criticizing the government’s “renewables-only” energy policy, Dutton promised to have the first nuclear reactor operating by the mid-2030s, should his Liberal–National Coalition win power in the next federal election (to be held on or before September 27, 2025). That promise, which would require overturns of existing federal and state bans on nuclear energy, has generated a great deal of controversy in Australia among government officials, political activists, and nuclear engineers.

The American Nuclear Society brought together 11 other energy and environmental advocacy organizations in calling on Congress to fund the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a new, technology-neutral, generic environmental standard for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States.

In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees, the groups ask for an additional $3 million in fiscal year 2025 for the EPA’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air to work on the new standard.