The Department of Energy’s special adviser for Environmental Management, William (Ike) White, told a Congressional panel Wednesday the agency’s cleanup branch is addressing research and development problems raised in an October 2021 Government Accountability Office report.
The Office of Environmental Management has issued a definition for research and development (R&D) and is in the early stages of deploying a database tracking nuclear-cleanup-related R&D, across the old nuclear weapons complex, White told the House Science, Space and Technology energy subcommittee.
“We did that last year,” White said of the definition. The database thus far is only populated with technology development directed out of headquarters, he added.
Subcommittee chair Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) said over the years Environmental Management research and development spending has gone from about 5% of the annual budget to less than 1%.
The DOE requested Congress fund science and technology development at the nuclear cleanup branch at $25 million in fiscal 2023. That is $5 million less than the $30 million in the fiscal 2022 budget and far from the $300 million included for this purpose in the 1990s, according to a 2019 National Academies of Science report ordered by Congress in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act.
Nathan Anderson, a director with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) nuclear security and cleanup, testified that Environmental Management’s approach to R&D has traditionally been very “ad hoc.” It is also often driven by individual cleanup sites and DOE laboratories, he added.
But lack of a guiding headquarters strategy probably slows long-term or complex wide needs, Anderson said in his testimony.
GAO found EM could not immediately identify how much funding went to R&D, Anderson said. More coordinated research and development could better prepare DOE to reduce its more than $500 billion in environmental liabilities, GAO has said.
“One of the things that’s important for return-on-investment is targeting,” said Anderson, who testified remotely. Currently EM’s biggest budget items in its $7.6-billion in spending are tank waste, decommissioning and demolition and site support, Anderson said. Some technologies like robots, who never need a day off, could have a high return on investment, said the GAO official.
John Plodinec, a former Savannah River Site hand and vice chair of a committee studying science and technology at Environmental Management (EM) for the National Academies of Science, said the cleanup office leans too heavily on its private contractors to identify science and technology needs.
Plodinec’s biography says he helped design the Defense Waste Processing Facility in South Carolina, which for now remains “the nation’s first and the free world’s largest facility” for vitrifying high-level waste into a glass form, according to the bio. The DOE hopes a bigger facility, the Waste Treatment Plant being built at the Hanford Site in Washington state, will come online in fewer than 18 months.
A “robust” science and technology program can lead to breakthroughs with the potential to reduce the cost and duration of EM’s nuclear cleanup program, Plodinec said. Such an effort would have three major components — generating knowledge, tailoring the information for specific needs and finally seeing that it is implemented by contractors in the field, he said.
Vahid Majidi, director of the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, said his researchers have about three-quarters of their EM funds targeted for Savannah River Site. The rest of the funding is devoted to helping solve EM’s most urgent needs.
The Savannah River National Laboratory has been working with DOE to identify more cost-effective ways to deal with low-level radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site, Majidi said.
The hearing did veer from research into operations, as White estimated the final cleanup of Hanford would be “on the order of six decades,” which would be into the 2080s. “There is a lot of uncertainty associated with that number,” White said in response to a question from Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.).
“I am very hopeful” Hanford will commence direct feed low-activity waste operations by the end of 2023, White told Weapons Complex Monitor after the hearing.
