June 22, 2014

House Approps Questions EM Support of NNSA Missions

By ExchangeMonitor

Raising questions about how much the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management supports National Nuclear Security Administration missions, the House Appropriations Committee last week directed $21.3 million in funding for nonproliferation work in Russia to go toward spent foreign fuel work at the Savannah River Site and the Idaho National Laboratory. In the report accompanying its version of the Fiscal Year 2015 Energy and Water Appropriations Act, the committee said the NNSA has “not been accounting for the costs of its material removal program and is placing an increasing financial burden on the Defense Environmental Cleanup program to pay for these costs.” The bill, which provides funding for NNSA, EM and other DOE programs, is expected to be taken up on the House floor this week.

With an increased amount of spent foreign fuel pouring into the sites from President Obama’s four-year effort to secure vulnerable nuclear materials around the world, the committee directed DOE to reanalyze the costs of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative program and provide a report to Congress within 90 days of the enactment of the bill outlining an updated cost sharing arrangement for spent fuel storage, processing and other NNSA missions that EM supports, citing feedstock production. “Funding for Defense Environmental Cleanup is intended to be used for the cleanup of the legacy of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, not to meet the costs of international material consolidation and removal activities in support of U.S. nonproliferation goals,” the committee said.

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