President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team this week drew a snarl from one of the Senate’s top nuclear policymakers, who vowed to keep a close eye on the incoming administration’s demand that the Energy Department provide target budget and staffing levels its national nuclear cleanup programs.
“I intend to closely follow the transition process at the Department of Energy and also will be monitoring the incoming administration to determine whether employees and contractors are being mistreated,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, wrote in a Tuesday letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
Cantwell — who has many constituents at and around DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. — also asked for copies of any answers DOE sends the incoming Trump administration in response to a wide-ranging list of questions transition officials sent the agency last week.
Among other things, Trump transition aides asked how much money DOE’s Office of Environmental Management needs for its national nuclear cleanup program, and what the office’s staffing priorities are in the coming year.
“What is the right level of funding for EM to make meaningful progress across the complex and meet milestone and regulatory requirements?” the transition team asked in a memo first obtained and reported on Dec. 9 by Bloomberg and later released by The New York Times. “What program milestones will be reached in each of the four next years?”
Hanford got perhaps the sternest glare from the transition team, which directed DOE to describe “alternatives to the ever-increasing cost and schedule” for the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel National is building to turn the former plutonium production site’s 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste into more easily storable glass cylinders.
Bechtel’s Waste Treatment Plant contract, awarded in 2000 and modified since, is worth more than $11 billion. The cost is expected to rise as part of DOE’s effort to begin treating Hanford’s less-radioactive liquid waste in 2022. The plant must be online and treating all Hanford waste by 2036, a federal judge ruled in March.
Bechtel National declined to comment this week and referred questions to DOE. Kristen Ellis, acting director of communications for the Office of Environmental Management, did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week. Bechtel is still waiting on a major contract modification, expected to be finalized before Dec. 31, that could allow the Waste Treatment Plant to begin treating some Hanford waste by 2022.
The Trump team by midweeek was reportedly disavowing the DOE questionnaire as officially unauthorized, but Cantwell kept up the pressure in a letter sent Thursday to Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Despite the apparent walkback from the questionnaire, “these questions plainly reflect the thinking of a Transition Team that appears hostile, in part, to the department’s mission and programs,” Cantwell said.
“Congress has repeatedly supported the legal and moral obligations of the federal government to clean up Hanford and the other nuclear weapons complex sites. The next administration should be equally as supportive. Proper funding not only will continue the decontamination of the site, but it also will ensure that worker safety is achieved during these dangerous cleanup operations,” Cantwell wrote.
In the questionnaire, Trump transition aides also asked DOE if there are “plans to add staff to EM,” and if so, what the agency’s “staffing priorities” are for the roughly $6-billion-a-year Cold War cleanup office. The Environmental Management office now employs about 1,400 civil servants nationwide, including roughly 160 at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., and about 110 in Germantown, Md., some 30 miles northwest by road of the Capitol.
Besides Hanford, the transition team also put DOE under the gun with specific questions about cleanup programs at the Paducah Site near Paducah, Ky.; and the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio. Trump Tower asked DOE “what is the plan” to pay for cleanup of the former uranium enrichment facilities at those sites, once the government runs out of uranium to barter for cleanup services.
Uranium barter covers much of the cost of cleanup at Portsmouth and Paducah, with the remainder coming out of the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund in DOE’s annual appropriation from Congress. Contractors that agree to the uranium barter arrangement, such as Portsmouth decontamination prime Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, are at the mercy of uranium spot prices, which have steadily declined since 2007.
The downward trend in uranium spot prices leaves cleanup management by DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office perpetually in need of congressional help. In the four-month continuing resolution passed last week, for example, Congress funded the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund at the annual equivalent of more than $765 million: better than a 10-percent increase from the 2016 appropriation.
The bill does allow DOE to take money out of the uranium cleanup fund and move it to other programs in a process known as reprogramming. However, lawmakers attached a string to that authority: DOE may not drain the fund below the fiscal 2016 appropriation of about $675 million. DOE EM also said this week that reprogramming would be restricted to programs paid for via the UED&D Fund.
