The head of the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office assured a congressional panel Wednesday she will get to the bottom of its mushrooming environmental liability.
“We are going to find out,” Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White said when asked about the cause of escalating liability, by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce oversight and investigations subcommittee convened to address the issue.
As of fiscal 2018, the Energy Department’s total environmental liability stood at $494 billion, according to DOE’s latest financial report. Of that, $377 billion came from the 16 nuclear sites administered by the Office of Environmental Management (EM).
The office’s environmental liability grew by $214 billion between fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2018, David Trimble, Government Accountability Office (GAO) director for natural resources and the environment, said in his testimony to the panel. But Environmental Management has not analyzed why this is happening, he added. If DOE officials don’t understand what is driving costs, they are not likely know how to fix the problem, according to Trimble.
In February 2017, GAO added DOE environmental liability to its list of high-risk federal endeavors, Trimble said, noting his office has also reported on challenges facing EM management. His testimony drew upon five reports the congressional auditor issued in the first quarter of this year.
Environmental Management is in the final stages of reviewing a study on the rise in liability and how to address GAO concerns, White said. The office has not said the report could be issued.
Recent liability figures were swollen by growing life-cycle costs at the Hanford Site in Washington state, White said. The former plutonium production complex is the department’s largest and most complex remediation job and governed in part by a decades-old agreement between DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state. The agency said in February the cost of complete Hanford restoration would likely be $323 billion in a best-case scenario or over $600 billion in the worst-case scenario.
About 30% to 60% of the Environmental Management budget funds recurring tasks such as physical security and maintaining infrastructure, Trimble said. It’s dubbed “minimum safety work” in DOE parlance, and is basically “overhead,” he added.
Trimble said Environmental Management lacks a detailed program-wide strategy for tackling the worst risks. The office sometimes seems like a “confederacy of sites” rather than a whole program, he added.
White said she accepts the findings of various GAO reports and is devoted to making improvements. “It is time to modernize our approach to EM’s cleanup mission,” she said in her testimony. This includes tapping maturing technology, updating life-cycle cost estimates, and continuing to overhaul contracting.
White assured lawmakers of her commitment to change the culture at EM.
The office “will not just pay for contractors to show up,” White said. She also touted her end-state contracting approach, which will offer higher fees to contractors that complete milestones on time.
Trimble said he lacks sufficient knowledge the end-state approach to venture an opinion on it. But many problems vexing the nuclear remediation office are deeply ingrained and might not be solved by tweaking the contracting approach, he said. For example, DOE does not follow best practices for “monitoring and controlling the program.”
Given the growing environmental liability, some Democrats said they were puzzled by the Donald Trump administration’s budget request, which would decrease EM spending from the current $7.2 billion to $6.5 billion in the 2020 federal fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
“I know how important this work is,” said subcommittee Chairwoman Diana DeGette (D-Colo.). Her district is not far from the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver, where cleanup is finished. “The bad news is there are 16 other sites,” she added.
At the same time, Republicans said licensing of an underground repository such as Yucca Mountain in Nevada would give DOE facilities a permanent disposal site for their high-level radioactive waste. The Savannah River Site has HLW that has been turned into a glass-like form but remains in South Carolina because there is no high-level disposal site, said Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.).
Duncan, who describes himself as a “fiscal hawk,” said he would support DOE funding to move radioactive waste away from rivers.