WASHINGTON — Sen. Patty Murray (D) on Wednesday became the latest lawmaker from Washington state to chastise Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette for the deep budget cuts proposed for the Hanford Site in fiscal 2021.
Funding for the two Energy Department offices at Hanford, considered the nation’s most complex and expensive nuclear cleanup, would be slashed from $2.6 billion enacted by Congress for fiscal 2020 to roughly $1.9 billion in the budget year starting Oct. 1. Spending for the entire DOE Office of Environmental Management would drop to $6.1 billion from the current $7.5 billion, under the White House budget issued in February.
“There are several cleanup projects underway that stand to be significantly harmed,” Murray told Brouillette during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development hearing on the $35.4 billion Energy Department budget request.
Like Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) during a House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee hearing last week, Murray said remediation of contaminated soil under Hanford’s 324 Building, also known the Chemical Materials Engineering Laboratory, would be delayed by the budget cut.
The budget request line item for the River Corridor Closure Project, which includes Building 324, decreases from almost $134 million enacted in fiscal 2020 to $30 million in fiscal 2021. This is sufficient to provide continued monitoring of the building, DOE says.
Brouillette said the Building 324 project is at a convenient point where work can safely be paused. The situation is stable and the next step would be “to break through the floor,” to access the contaminated soil, he added.
The Wednesday exchange between Brouillette and western lawmakers continued many of the themes started in last week’s hearing in the House and the DOE chief’s Tuesday’s appearance before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In the last two weeks Brouillette has testified before three congressional panels on the DOE budget.
In the Energy Committee, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) waved from the dais a pair of letters that, she said, came from “managers from the Hanford Site,” who claim the proposed budget is $1.5 billion short of what crews there need to meet their obligations under the Tri-Party Agreement that governs remediation of the federal property.
Cantwell did not identify the managers or their corporate affiliations in the open hearing.
Brouillette, who became energy secretary in December after more than two years as DOE deputy, said he wanted to know more.
“If it would be possible to get a copy of those letters,” Brouillette said, “I’d appreciate that.”
In his defenses of the budget, Brouillette said DOE could tap certain “carry-over” funds from the current year, although he offered no specifics on this.
An Energy Department spokesperson could provide no further specifics in a Wednesday email. “My budget folks informed me that the budget request doesn’t contain information on carryover.”
Brouillette also said during his congressional appearances that hefty Hanford funding in recent years accomplished goals that protect the environment and reduce the risk to human safety and health. The energy secretary specifically pointed to the 2019 completion of a project to move 35 cubic yards of K-Basin reactor sludge away from the Columbia River to an underground T Plant storage facility.
Such progress allows the agency to make do with a lower appropriation for 2021, Brouillette said. The agency is prioritizing urgent remediation across the old weapons complex to compensate for budget increase sought by the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration for current nuclear weapons programs, he added.
The energy secretary also said the agency will finish building facilities for Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste at Hanford’s Waste Treatment Plant in the coming fiscal year. The department remains on track to start converting low-activity waste through the facility into a glass-like form by 2023, Brouillette said.
Murray, however, said reduced funding for Hanford would hurt efforts by DOE and its contractors to identify and head off prospective threats in aging facilities, such as the May 2017 partial collapse of an underground tunnel used to store contaminated equipment at the Plutonium Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant. Both underground tunnels at PUREX have since been shored up with grout.
Brouillette replied that new robotics technology will enable more effective monitoring of such sites in the future without exposing workers to highly contaminated areas.
New Mexico Lawmakers Find Various Ways to Voice Displeasure With LANL Funding
During the Tuesday hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) bluntly expressed his dissatisfaction with proposed funding for Environmental Management, telling Brouillette the agency’s 2021 budget “frankly sucks.”
Heinrich was steamed that EM spending at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in his state would drop by about 40% on a year-over-year basis. The cleanup spending would drop from $220 million to $120 million under the request.
With the request budget, Brouillette told Heinrich, the Energy Department could still meet legal cleanup milestones at the northern New Mexico property, as specified by a consent order between the state and federal governments.
“Some of the cuts that you’re referring to involve carry-over funds, unexpended funds from years past,” Brouillette said, invoking a similar theme to the Hanford budget defense. “So those monies are not needed for us in ‘21, at this point in time.”
“I’m not sure that inspires confidence in me,” Heinrich responded.
At the Wednesday appropriations hearing, Heinrich’s colleague, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), said the proposed cuts to environmental remediation “will not stand.” Udall called the spending proposal for LANL cleanup in fiscal 2021, “the worst number I’ve seen in 20 years.”
A year ago the White House proposed a DOE Office of Environmental Management budget of $6.5 billion, a figured that Congress would eventually raise to almost $7.5 billion.
“We are talking cleanup of radioactive waste,” Udall said. New Mexico residents have worked in the government’s nuclear program for decades, he noted, and many have damaged their health as a result.
The state is home to DOE’s Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, along with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near the city of Carlsbad.
Nuclear cleanup is crucial, Udall added: “I am not going to ask you to justify that cut for Los Alamos because it cannot be justified.”
Numerous lawmakers noted during the budget hearings that Congress will have the final say in Energy Department funding for the next fiscal year. Brouillette said he fully understands that point.
One nuclear industry observer said Thursday the Brouillette and other decision makers in the Donald Trump administration have merely proposed budget cuts that they know Congress will restore.
ExchangeMonitor Reporters Dan Leone and Wayne Barber contributed to this story.
