Morning Briefing - March 12, 2020
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March 12, 2020

House Appropriators Repeat it for White: EM Budget Cuts Not Happening

By ExchangeMonitor

House appropriators got their first crack at acting Environmental Management head Ike White on Wednesday, when they promised the interim cleanup manager that proposed cuts to legacy nuclear waste cleanup will not stand — especially not at the Hanford Site.

The script is familiar by now, written at the beginning of the Donald Trump administration’s first term and and played out already this year in a series of hearings with White’s boss, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette: appropriations committees in both chambers are unhappy that the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) will have to tighten its belt as the National Nuclear Security Administration ramps up spending on U.S. nuclear-weapons modernization.

“[M]y work here and the work of my colleagues … in the Senate, including Sen. [Patty] Murray (D-Wash.), it’s all to ensure one thing: that we do not allow this budget request to become a reality,” Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) told Ike White in a Wednesday hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee.

Hanford, by far the site worst contaminated by the Cold War nuclear-weapons buildup, is regularly a target for White House budget cuts. In Congress, the site is a bipartisan issue with strong representation among appropriators.

This year, those appropriators are calling attention to the same needy programs at the Eastern Washington site, especially cleanup of contaminated soil beneath Building 324. The administration wants to postpone that work in order to conserve funding for the main thrust of liquid-waste cleanup on the reservation, the Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste facility. 

“The fact that our budget may not have been able to fit everything for the current fiscal year within the top line that reflects a broader set of national priorities does not mean that we’re not committed to getting it done,” White said Wednesday, just days after returning to Washington from the annual Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix. “[W]e are committed to getting it done, whenever funding becomes available to do that work.”

The White House requested a little more than $6 billion for EM in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, down from the 2020 appropriation of about $7.5 billion. The two DOE offices at Hanford would collectively get slashed to just under $2 billion from the 2020 budget of more than $2.5 billion, under the request.

As it did last year, when the administration sought cuts for EM but wound up with a raise, that funding may become available sooner rather than later.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the chair of the subcommittee, said Wednesday the EM budget request was “unrealistic,” and that the panel would be “adapting it accordingly.”

The subcommittee’s ranking member, characteristically, was more blunt.

“Congress will make some significant changes” to the EM budget request, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told White. “I doubt very seriously that this committee is going to go along with the budget request.”

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NEW: Via public records request, I’ve been able to confirm reporting today that a warrant has been issued for DOE deputy asst. secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition Sam Brinton for another luggage theft, this time at Las Vegas’s Harry Reid airport. (cc: @EMPublications)

DOE spent fuel lead Brinton accused of second luggage theft.



by @BenjaminSWeiss, confirming today's reports with warrant from Las Vegas Metro PD.

Waste has been Emplaced! 🚮

We have finally begun emplacing defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste in Panel 8 of #WIPP.

Read more about the waste emplacement here: https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp_news_20221123-2.asp

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