The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would get about $6.5 billion for fiscal 2018, including a small increase for the agency’s major closure sites and a small overall decrease for uranium-enrichment cleanups, according to a leaked document a Washington, D.C.-based think tank said contains the White House’s upcoming budget request.
The spreadsheet was released Thursday by Third Way, which claimed the document was a leak from within the Donald Trump administration and contained no classified information. Neither the Energy Department nor the White House Office of Management and Budget replied to requests for comment Friday, but the White House had not disavowed the spreadsheet publicly at press time Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor.
For the Defense Environmental Cleanup line item, which includes five major DOE Environmental Management sites, plus remediation operations at facilities overseen by the department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, the Trump administration requested more than $5.5 billion: almost a 2 1/2 percent increase from the current appropriation.
Environmental Management facilities grouped under this budget line item are: the Hanford Site in Richland, Wash.; the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.; the Idaho Site, co-located with the Idaho National Laboratory; the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; and the Oak Ridge Reservation near Oak Ridge, Tenn.
For the three major DOE cleanups funded by the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund — the Paducah, Portsmouth and Oak Ridge sites in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee — the Trump administration requested a roughly 2-percent cut from 2017 levels to just over $750 million.
For Non-Defense Environmental Cleanup — which includes, among other things, the budget for the West Valley Demonstration Project in upstate New York — the administration requested about $220 million, or a 12-percent cut from the 2017 appropriation.
The leaked spreadsheet includes only overall spending levels for the budgetary line items the Office of Management and Budget uses for bookkeeping. The document did not include the detailed spending breakdown expected to accompany the Trump administration’s full 2018 budget, which is due next week.
