House appropriators told the head of the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office on Wednesday that the budget cut proposed for fiscal 2021 will not stand, especially not at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The script is familiar by now, written at the beginning of the Donald Trump administration’s first term and played out already this year in a series of hearings with Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette: Appropriations committees in both chambers of Congress are unhappy that DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) must tighten its belt as the National Nuclear Security Administration ramps up spending on U.S. nuclear-weapons modernization.
“[M]y work here and the work of my colleagues … in the Senate, including Sen. [Patty] Murray (D-Wash.), it’s all to ensure one thing: that we do not allow this budget request to become a reality,” Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) told William (Ike) White, DOE senior adviser for environmental management, in a hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee.
Hanford, by far the site worst contaminated by the Cold War nuclear-weapons buildup, is regularly a target for White House budget cuts. In Congress, the former plutonium production complex is a bipartisan issue with strong representation among appropriators.
This year, those appropriators are calling attention to the same needy programs at the Eastern Washington site, especially cleanup of contaminated soil beneath Building 324. The administration wants to postpone that work temporarily in order to conserve funding to begin processing low-activity waste by 2023 at the Waste Treatment Plant.
“The fact that our budget may not have been able to fit everything for the current fiscal year within the top line that reflects a broader set of national priorities does not mean that we’re not committed to getting it done,” White told the subcommittee Wednesday, just days after returning to Washington from the annual Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix. “[W]e are committed to getting it done, whenever funding becomes available to do that work.”
The White House requested a little more than $6 billion for EM in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, down from the 2020 appropriation of about $7.5 billion. The two DOE offices at Hanford would collectively get slashed to just under $2 billion from the 2020 budget of more than $2.5 billion.While Hanford still has the biggest budget of any site, it would also undergo the biggest funding cut.
If last year is the model, the proposed cuts will get a raise from Capitol Hill. The administration initially sought $6.5 billion for DOE nuclear cleanup in fiscal 2020, but congressional appropriators tacked about $1 billion more. At Hanford the administration sought $2.1 billion for fiscal 2020, and the site that’s not expected to be fully cleaned up before 2070, was approved for $2.5 billion.
Subcommittee Chair Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said the EM budget request was “unrealistic,” and that the panel would be “adapting it accordingly.” Ohio is home to another major cleanup job: the Portsmouth Site, near the village of Piketon. Its funding would decline only $2 million, from $493 million to $491 million.
The subcommittee’s ranking member, characteristically, was more blunt.
“Congress will make some significant changes” to the EM budget request, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told White. “I doubt very seriously that this committee is going to go along with the budget request.”
Idaho also has DOE site that is home both to active research and environmental remediation: the Idaho National Laboratory. The Idaho cleanup funding would be cut from $446 million enacted in 2020 to $271 million in fiscal 2021.
Newhouse said he fears important work could fall behind under the budget request for Hanford, which sits within his congressional district. “There would be essentially no work done, conducted, on the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, or the WESF,” the lawmaker said. “Not long ago … they considered the work being done there, and the pool the capsules are stored in, to be the greatest risk in the nationwide DOE complex for a serious accident.”
Currently, DOE keeps capsules of highly radioactive cesium and strontium underwater in a concrete pool built in the 1970s at the WESF. A subcontractor has been retained to start constructing a dry storage area for the waste during the current fiscal year. The agency has previously said it wants to move the capsules to dry storage by summer 2025.
A 10-year “vision” document issued Monday by the Office of Environmental Management said it will “continue to evaluate the transfer” of the capsules but did not appear to say anything about completion.
Newhouse also criticized any pause on removing radioactive soil under Hanford’s 324 Building: “That is, literally, yards from the Columbia River.”
The vision document also indicated the 324 Building will be placed in “surveillance and maintenance” until remediation resumes. Brouillette recently told Congress the 324 work is at a convenient place for a pause prior to workers breaking through the floor.
While White was being challenged by lawmakers, the fiscal 2021 budget request also generated questions during various sessions at the Waste Management Symposia. Todd Shrader, principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, said the funding proposal is sufficient to comply with legal obligations and avoid “workforce” disruptions.
Hanford Site Manager Brian Vance said, in the end, Congress will set the budget figure. If it is more than what DOE requested, then the agency will simply add more work for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.