The Joe Biden administration this week requested more than $8.2 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management in fiscal 2025, or $253 million less than the $8.5-billion spending package finally approved by Congress and signed by the president last weekend.
The formal request, which merely provides the starting point for congressional appropriators, makes the biggest trim in the Defense Environmental Cleanup tranche, which would drop to less than $7.1 billion in the spending year starting Oct. 1. That’s down from about $7.3 billion in fiscal 2024.
Non-defense Environmental Cleanup would be trimmed $27 million to $314.6 million, down from $342 million in fiscal 2024. The Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund would remain basically flat: $854 million plus change requested in fiscal 2025, compared with $855 million in fiscal 2024.
The administration, however, requested more bucks for its biggest and costliest nuclear cleanup. Total spending at the Hanford Site in Washington state would amount to $3.1 billion, up from more than $2.9 billion in the current fiscal year, according to the latest request.
Hanford’s Office of River Protection, charged with overseeing 56 million gallons of radioactive tank waste, would receive $2 billion after getting $1.89 billion in fiscal 2024. The Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant is supposed to start changing some of the less-radioactive waste into glass in fiscal 2025.
Hanford’s Richland Operations Office, responsible for mostly solid waste cleanup at the heart of the former plutonium production complex, would get $1.1 billion, about $65 million more than the current year.
The Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where the National Nuclear Security Administration takes over as landlord in fiscal 2025, would see its Environmental Management budget cut $189 million below current levels if the request became law. Savannah River’s request is $1.46 billion for 2025, down from about $1.65 billion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
DOE requested $554 million for the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, down from nearly $565 million in the current fiscal year.
The administration’s $459-million request for the Idaho National Laboratory cleanup is $19 million less than the fiscal 2024 congressional enactment of $478 million.
For the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the administration asks $437 million, down about $30 million more than the fiscal 2024 congressional appropriation of $467 million. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is the only deep-underground repository for transuranic waste and is crucial to both legacy nuclear waste cleanup handled by the Office of Environmental Management and active nuclear weapons programs run by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration.