The Senate’s proposal to pile more funding into the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site cleanup program has set the stage for a parochial tug-of-war over the agency’s fiscal 2017 legacy waste-cleanup budget, once House and Senate lawmakers gather to reconcile the differing spending bills they produced this month.
The Senate’s proposed increase is for DOE’s Richland Operations Office, which manages cleanup of the Columbia River corridor at Hanford. Now, almost 40 years after DOE assumed responsibility for the former Pentagon plutonium-production site in Washington state, major portions of that cleanup are winding down. The Obama administration’s latest federal budget request reflects as much, requesting a year-over-year cut of more than 20 percent, to $715 million, for that work.
Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wasted no time publicly blasting the White House for the proposed cuts, and in the Senate’s $37.5-billion Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act of 2017 bumped the Richland Operations budget to $840 million or so — about 9 percent below current levels, but 17 percent more than requested and 11 percent more than the House provided in a companion energy and water spending package.
To pay for that plus-up, senators proposed smaller appropriations for other DOE cleanup activities than did their House counterparts. Among the accounts the Senate would pare back are DOE’s Idaho Site and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. WIPP, the underground salt mine, is DOE’s only disposal facility for equipment and material contaminated by elements heavier than uranium. The Idaho National Laboratory has more of that kind of waste, also called transuranic waste, than any other site in the DOE weapons complex.
The House’s version of DOE”s budget, which advanced to the floor after a long markup Tuesday, would provide $382 million for Idaho and $292 million for WIPP in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1: respectively, 5 percent and 6 percent more than the Senate bill would provide.
The House’s top waste-cleanup appropriator, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), appeared unperturbed Wednesday by the Senate’s move.
Following an industry-hosted Capitol Hill reception, Simpson — whose 2nd Congressional District includes the Idaho National Laboratory — said he had not seen the Senate’s markup, but that he was not worried about the Idaho Site or WIPP getting less money than recommended by the House Appropriations energy and water committee he chairs.
“We oftentimes in our bill kind of mark down areas we know they’re going to plus up [and] they mark down areas they know we’re going to plus up,” Simpson told Weapons Complex Monitor after a panel discussion hosted by the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute and the bipartisan House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus. “They know that in the end, they’re not going to take the money out of WIPP and out of Idaho.”
The Senate started floor debate on its bill Wednesday. The process will resume at 5:30 p.m. Monday, with more debate on more amendments.
The River Corridor Closure Project managed by DOE’s Richland Operations Office, focused on more than 750 solid and liquid waste sites close by the Columbia River shoreline. The effort is nearly complete, resulting in some $23 million in work that no longer needs to be done at the site, plus another $65 million spent in 2016 but not needed in 2017 for containers that will eventually hold highly radioactive sludge from Hanford’s K-West Basin, according to the White House’s fiscal 2017 budget request.
Not even one of the smallest of the White House’s proposed Richland cuts escaped the notice of the Washington state Senate delegation.
The administration proposed a $5-million cut to Richland Community and Regulatory Support. That would have left the program — which among other things pays fees associated with the locally staffed citizens’ group, the Hanford Advisory Board — with just over $14.5 million for fiscal 2017. That $5 million would go right back into the budget under the Senate proposal.
Cantwell used her status as ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to put her concern about this the proposed cut on Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz’s radar during a March 3 budget hearing.
“This is something that is very important to the people in the Tri-Cities,” Cantwell told Moniz during the hearing, one of the first forums of the 2017 budget cycle where lawmakers got their say.
