Nuclear weapons cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management would get a little more funding than requested for fiscal year 2022, if a House subcommittee’s recommended budget becomes law.
DOE Environmental Management (EM) would get just under $7.8 billion from the fiscal year 2022 spending bill the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee released on Sunday. The subcommittee was scheduled to vote on the bill during a webcast markup scheduled for at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Monday.
The subcommittee recommended more than $6.5 billion for EM’s Defense Environmental Cleanup account, the largest of the office’s three major spending lines. That’s about $165 million above both the 2021 appropriation and the 2022 request, after accounting for a tranche of funding to be siphoned into a EM account used for uranium enrichment cleanup. Defense Environmental Cleanup covers most of the solid- and liquid-waste cleanup at shuttered nuclear weapons production sites across the country.
The subcommittee’s bill has the requested $831 million or so for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund, which funds cleanup of shuttered gaseous diffusion enrichment plants at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. As requested, that’s about $10 million fewer than the 2021 appropriation of $841 million.
Like the Donald Trump administration before it, the Joe Biden administration plans to tap into the U.S. Enrichment Corp. Fund to cover roughly have the UED&D Fund’s bills. As requested, the subcommittee bill would top off the UED&D Fund with a roughly $415 million infusion from the Defense Environmental Cleanup account.
Non-Defense Environmental Cleanup, which among other things includes cleanup of the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, would receive about $334 million, or $5 million fewer than requested. That still works out to more than $14.5 million above the 2021 appropriation of just under $320 million.
As usual, the initial release of the subcommittee’s bill did not include its companion spending report, which includes a line-by-line breakdown of the proposed budget for EM’s programs and commentary from the subcommittee about its funding decisions. The subcommittee usually releases the report a day before the full Appropriations Committee marks up the draft DOE spending bill. At deadline, the full committee mark was on the slate for 9 a.m. Eastern time on Friday.
Editor’s note, 07/13/2021, the story and the headline were corrected to show that the subcommittee’s spending bill would provide roughly the requested funding for fiscal year 2022, and that the legislation would meet DOE’s request for the UED&D Fund in by transferring funds from the Defense Environmental Cleanup appropriation.
