Excerpt from Nuclear Regulatory Commission User Fees: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Regulation of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, Second Session, March 9, 1994
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2 p.m. in room 406, Russell Senate Office Building, Hon. Joseph I. Lieberman chairman of the subcommittee presiding.
Present: Senators Lieberman, Kempthorne, and Simpson.
Opening Statement of Hon. Joseph I. Lieberman, U.S. Senator from the State of Connecticut
Senator Lieberman. I call the hearing to order. Senator Simpson, I believe, is on his way. I'll see if I can conduct a mini-filibuster until he gets here.
We've been informed that we may have stacked votes, as we call them, at 3 p.m., so we would like to get started.
The hearing before the subcommittee today will focus on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's user fees. Under current law, the NRC is required to recover 100 percent of its budget from fees imposed on NRC licensees. NRC licensees, have raised concerns about the fairness of this requirement and about the NRC's implementation of it.
Pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 1992, the NRC has prepared a report to Congress on the fairness of the fee structure. Today we're going to examine that report and hear the concerns of a number of NRC licensees about the fee system.
The requirement that the NRC recover all of its budget from fees of licensees was first imposed in the 1990 Budget Agreement. Although the Environment Committee was on record as opposing an increase to that level - the 100 percent level - the then Administration, the Bush Administration, and the House and Senate budget committees favored the increase, and the Environment Committee was directed to recover 100 percent of the NRC's budget.
At the time, I personally indicated my concern with the increase. However, the full committee was left with little choice but to follow the so-called reconciliation instructions as part of the budget process. The 1993 Reconciliation Bill, which was passed last August, better known as the Great Budget Bill of 1993, extended the 100 percent recovery level for another 3 years until 1998.
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