The Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex has entered fiscal 2025 facing more than a half-trillion dollars in environmental liability, the rising threat of cyber-attack and the need to revive plutonium pit production.
Those are a few takeaways in a DOE Office of Inspector General (OIG) management challenges report about the department’s Office of Environmental Management and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Fiscal 2025 started Oct. 1.
The report, publicly-released by OIG last week, cites the $545 billion in cleanup liability as a priority for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. The office is charged with cleaning up Cold War and Manhattan Project nuclear weapon production sites.
Radioactive liquid waste operations at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Idaho National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, account for much of the liability, the OIG report said.
DOE hopes a 2019 reinterpretation of the term “high-level radioactive waste” will open the door to “new disposition pathways for tank waste,” OIG said. The reinterpretation made during the first administration of President Donald Trump (R) in 2019 and then reaffirmed by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in 2021, says some less-risky high-level waste can be disposed of at licensed low-level facilities.
Under this provision, a shipment of contaminated process equipment left the Savannah River Site in March 2024, OIG said in the report. Future shipments of contaminated equipment from SRS to a licensed commercial disposal facility “will continue as necessary,” OIG said.
As for Savannah River’s Salt Waste Processing Facility, it had processed about 7.5 million gallons of salt waste as of December 2023, OIG said. DOE managers at Savannah River expect the facility to reach up to 6 million gallons annually as early as this fiscal year before eventually rising to 9 million gallons per year.
At Hanford, cold commissioning of the Bechtel-built Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant was preparing to start last month, OIG said. The vitrification plant is scheduled to start turning some low-level radioactive waste into glass form by August 2025.
At the Idaho National Laboratory, a facility built to solidify 900,000 gallons of high-level liquid sodium waste has needed much downtime to make fixes since hot operations started in May 2023, OIG said. But the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit has solidified more than 74,000 gallons of sodium-bearing waste to date, according to the report.
For NNSA, re-establishing plutonium pit production for nuclear warheads has been called a “must do” by the U.S. Strategic Command, OIG said. During the Cold War days, the now-demolished Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado would make more than 1,000 pits per year.
Nowadays, NNSA is working toward the manufacture of at least 80 pits annually combined at Savannah River and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, OIG said in the report. “The OIG did not perform any oversight work over the last year pertaining to this challenge area; therefore, we cannot give an opinion on the Department’s progress in this area.”
The NNSA has admitted that it cannot make 50 pits per year at Savannah River and 80 pits overall by 2030.
The Los Alamos Plutonium Facility-4 has produced 30 pits since 2000 and has a long way to go before reaching 30 per year, according to NNSA. While the Los Alamos facility made its first war reserve W87-1 pit in the 2024 calendar year, procurement of new gloveboxes have gone slower than expected at the New Mexico lab, according to the report. “The bulk of equipment is expected to arrive next year.”
However, NNSA said work is “ahead of schedule” for installing gloveboxes at the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, OIG said. The plutonium processing facility at SRS, being built from a structure DOE originally planned for a Mixed-Oxide-Fuel Fabrication center. The large caveat attached is DOE has yet to issue critical decision-2 for the SRS plutonium facility, the milestone that will provide cost and schedule information, OIG said.
Currently, Savannah River managers think the first production pit there is on track for 2035, but that is subject to change, OIG said.
DOE-wide, much of the OIG report touches on physical and cybersecurity at federal facilities, including national laboratories. Look for a report in the summer of 2025 that examines “security activities to counter foreign influence” at certain national laboratories, OIG said.
DOE rolled out its Cybersecurity Strategy in January 2024 and has been moving toward something called a “zero trust” standard since 2021, OIG reported. Warding off cyber attacks from hackers, terror groups and state actors can be costly, OIG said.
“In some cases, Department programs and sites report needing funding to close recommendations issued by the OIG,” according to the report. “Some officials report being faced with difficult choices between addressing cybersecurity weaknesses or conducting mission specific work, such as environmental clean-up, reducing the threat of nuclear proliferation, or conducting critical research at one of the many National Laboratories.”
