A House subcommittee on Wednesday approved a fiscal 2018 spending bill that would hold the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup budget roughly even with the current appropriation.
That is about all that is known about the lower chamber’s plans for the department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) for the fiscal year beginnng Oct. 1, as lawmakers will not release details of their proposed DOE budget until a day before the full House Appropriations Committee marks up the roughly $38-billion Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill.
The House Appropriations Committee had not scheduled its markup at press time for Weapons Complex Monitor. Congress will be out of session next week for the U.S. Independence Day holiday.
Within the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee’s proposed DOE budget of roughly $30 billion, EM would receive some $6.4 billion: about what the office got this year under the omnibus appropriations bill signed into law May 23, and slightly below the $6.5 billion the Donald Trump administration requested.
Within the EM total, the subcommittee’s bill provides $5.4 billion or so for defense environmental cleanup: the account that pays for remediation of Cold War nuclear-weapon sites across the country. That also is about even with the 2017 appropriation, but 2-percent less than the current White House request.
Bill language released by the committee this week makes no mention of the $225 million the Trump administration seeks to transfer some nuclear facilities to EM from the National Nuclear Security Administration. The administration wants to give EM responsibility for so-far unidentified facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee.
The subcommittee’s total DOE budget proposal is about $2 billion higher than the Trump administration requested for 2018.
Meanwhile, the subcommittee’s bill essentially meets the administration’s ask for the proposed nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev. The bill would provide some $120 million within DOE for activities related to DOE’s application to license the site as a permanent repository for civilian and defense nuclear waste.
The proposed Yucca appropriation for DOE includes $30 million for disposal of nuclear waste generated by national defense programs.
Experts estimate it would take between two and five years to complete a Yucca license application, once DOE restarts one. The Barack Obama administration in 2010 halted the license application the George W. Bush administration started with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.