A draft spending bill released Tuesday afternoon would keep the Department of Energy’s legacy nuclear cleanup budget about even with current levels and quash the White House’s plan to change the way DOE pays for cleanup of former uranium enrichment sites.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would get about $6.15 billion in fiscal 2017 under the House Energy and Water Appropriations Bill. That would be roughly even with the $6.19 billion the White House requested and only about 1 percent lower than what Congress approved for the current budget year.
The House appropriations energy and water subcommittee, as it signaled in budget hearings over the last two months with DOE officials from Secretary Ernest Moniz on down, did not go along with the White House’s plan to pay for uranium enrichment cleanup at DOE’s Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth sites by tapping into a moribund account that once funded operations of the U.S. Enrichment Corp., and by levying new fees for commercial nuclear power generators.
Instead, the bill would provide some $698.5 million for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, which has historically paid for this work. DOE estimates this fund faces a roughly $20 billion shortfall and, at the current rate of spending, will run dry in 2020, some two decades before the agency thinks it can finish legacy uranium enrichment cleanup.
At press time, the subcommittee had not released the bill’s companion report, which traditionally includes more granular details, such as the specific amount of funding proposed for the 11 active cleanup sites under EM’s purview.
However, the bill did specify that $26.8 million of the fiscal 2017 EM budget would go to New Mexico to pay for road and infrastructure improvements under a settlement DOE finalized with the state in January over damage claims arising from the 2014 accidents that closed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste disposal facility in the southeastern corner of the state.
The energy and water subcommittee is set to formally mark up the bill at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. The Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee will mark up a companion bill an hour later. The full Senate Appropriations Committee will then mark up that chamber’s energy and water spending bill Thursday morning. The House Appropriations Committee had not scheduled a full committee markup for its version of the bill at press time Tuesday.
