The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) would start cleaning up three facilities no longer needed for nuclear research or weapons work under a fiscal 2018 spending bill the House Appropriations Committee plans to mark up today.
The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee’s bill would provide $75 million for EM to start work on the three facilities, including two at active National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sites, according to a detailed bill report released Tuesday.
That is only about one-third of what the Donald Trump administration requested in May to transfer an unspecified number of so-called excess facilities to EM in fiscal 2018. The House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, which passed its bill June 28, took note of that ambiguity in the newly published bill report.
“The budget request proposed a new program line to allow for disposition of excess facilities, but the request did not propose a list of the facilities and cost estimates,” the House subcommittee wrote in the report. “The recommendation includes funding above the budget request for individual EM sites to accelerate known demolition projects and initiate new transfers to EM.”
Under the subcommittee’s bill, excess facilities EM could start cleaning up in the budget year starting Oct. 1 — and the corresponding EM funding level for the year — are:
- The Y–12 Biology Complex at the Oak Ridge site in Tennessee; $35 million.
- The B280 Pool Type Reactor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California; $30 million.
- The Experimental Breeder Reactor–II Reactor Dome at the Idaho Site; up to $10 million.
Overall, DOE EM would receive roughly $6.4 billion in fiscal 2018, if the House subcommittee’s bill becomes law. That would be less than a 1-percent cut from the 2017 budget and almost 2 percent less than what the Trump administration requested for EM in 2018.
The House subcommittee’s bill also asked DOE to consider consolidating the Office of River Protection and the Richland Operations Office at the agency’s sprawling Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The offices, respectively, manage liquid and solid waste cleanup at the former plutonium production site. River Protection and Richland would get a combined $2.4 billion or so, under the bill to be marked up today.
Furthermore, the bill would deny DOE’s request to prepare transuranic waste at the Livermore National Laboratory for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., in 2018.
“Newly-identified streams of transuranic wastes should not delay shipments that are already in the queue and that are required to meet cleanup commitments when alternatives may be available,” the subcommittee wrote in the bill report. The subcommittee told NNSA to look into what those alternatives might be.