Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of quarterly news summaries and analyses about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. We’ll check in with one long, big-picture update every 25 days, with a regular flow of updates in between to keep you up to date on news affecting Department of Energy nuclear cleanup during the new administration’s crucial first days.
DAY 1 – JAN. 20, 2017: Inauguration Day
INDEX:
Complex-wide.
Hanford – Office of River Protection.
Idaho National Laboratory.
Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Savannah River Site.
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
In a big-picture sense, the legacy nuclear-cleanup obligations now under the stewardship of President Donald Trump are not markedly different than those with which the departed administration of former President Barack Obama dealt with from January 2009 to Friday.
For starters, there remain some 35 million gallons of liquid waste at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., more than 50 million gallons at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., and about 1 million gallons at the Idaho National Laboratory.
There is also a massive backlog of transuranic waste across the DOE complex, growing every year as contractors unearth more of the stuff. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, the final resting place for such material, is open again after nearly three years recovering from a pair of underground accidents; but it’s still not ready to bury waste at the pre-accident clip of more than 15 shipments a week.
Then there are decontamination, decommissioning, and demolition projects across the complex: at Hanford in Washington state; at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Ky.; and at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio.
Looming over all are questions of whether the Trump administration will try to fundamentally change the nation’s nuclear waste-disposal supply chain. Building the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada for all such waste, as many Republican lawmakers and Trump advisers want to do, would take the program in one direction. Building separate storage sites for commercial and defense waste, as the Obama administration wanted, would take it in another.
Official answers are coming, possibly within the first 100 days of the Trump administration. The Hill newspaper reported this week that the Trump administration planned to send its first formal budget request to Congress by late April.
The document will spell out, for the first time, exactly what the new president does and does not want to fund.
The timeline for a presidential budget requests, however, is always fungible. The White House is legally bound to deliver the request by the first Monday in February, but Presidents of both parties routinely flout that deadline. The Obama administration, for example, did not produce its first federal budget request until May.
In the absence of a spending proposal, there are few public statements from the Trump camp about DOE nuclear policy. The latest is an ambiguous declaration by Trump’s Energy Secretary Designate, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, during a hearing convened hours after news broke that the Trump administration planned to take an ax to the federal budget in fiscal year 2018.
During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Thursday, Perry told lawmakers legacy nuclear-waste cleanup at DOE was getting a hard look from the incoming administration.
“[P]rioritizing the funding and managing that funding in an appropriate way to cleanup these waste sites is going to be very, very high on the priority list,” Perry said.
So for now — and not in least part because the Trump transition team did not reply to questions about its priorities for nuclear cleanup during the first 100 days of the new administration — it is much easier to list the problems facing major DOE sites across the nuclear complex than the solutions.
Here are a few:
Complex-wide:
Appointing an Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management.
This senior executive service manager, who will require Senate confirmation, helms DOE’s cleanup of Cold War nuclear weapon sites. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it. The latest rumors point to a former DOE lawyer and current New York attorney named Gary Lavine. Lavine has not returned messages requesting comment.
The Department of Energy referred questions about the status of the current Environmental Manage chief, Monica Regalbuto, to the Trump transition.
Complex-wide: Resuming Yucca Mountain licensing.
Yucca is a dual-stream waste facility which, if built, would provide a final resting place for tens of thousands of tons of commercial and defense nuclear waste. The Obama administration voluntarily ended the Yucca licensing process in 2010, but the Trump administration could restart it.
Complex-wide: Renegotiating environmental remediation deals with state partners, in the mold of the consent agreement struck last year with the state of New Mexico for cleanup of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Trump campaigned as a dealmaker, and there are plenty of people in the DOE nuclear world who think the agency could have made better deals with state authorities that regulate some of the most challenging nuclear cleanups.
Frank Marcinowski, an agency veteran and career civil servant who holds DOE’s top nuclear cleanup policy post, last year lamented that the agency’s legal obligations with the states often do not align with budget realities in Washington, D.C.
As for the type of agreement that might replace the old deals, Mark Whitney, DOE’s former principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, said last year’s revised consent order between DOE and New Mexico for legacy cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory is “an excellent template.” The deal created more flexible cleanup deadlines and gave DOE legal permission to revise its cleanup schedule each year.
Of course, some state governments are perfectly happy to enforce the agreements they already have. Look no further for an example than Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, who refuses to let any spent nuclear fuel into the state until DOE starts liquid waste cleanup at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit. DOE has complained the standoff has stunted research at the lab, but Wasden hasn’t budged.
Hanford – Office of River Protection:
Dealing with a worker-protection lawsuit that could slow liquid-waste cleanup substantially.
DOE and its waste tank farm contractor face a lawsuit in Washington state, in which the state attorney general, labor unions, and a non-profit nuclear watchdog seek an overhaul of the safety procedures for tank farm workers.
The defendants say giving the state and its co-plaintiffs what they want would drastically slow the pace of cleanup at Hanford and delay startup of the site’s Low-Activity Waste Treatment Facility. The case will not go to trial until September, but Trump’s DOE will continue building its case throughout the critical first 100 days.
Idaho National Laboratory: Setting a new deadline for starting up liquid waste treatment at the lab’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit.
Nearly 1 million gallons of liquid waste await treatment at Idaho, and the state attorney general, as mentioned above, will not let the site’s national lab receive any spent nuclear fuel for its research until this work starts.
This could be another potential job for the dealmaker-in-chief and Energy Secretary-designate, Perry.
Los Alamos National Laboratory: Readying the last of the lab’s improperly remediated nitrate salts for shipment to WIPP, then applying that treatment to hundreds more barrels of LANL nitrate salts stored at the Waste Control Specialists complex near Andrews, Texas — a company with which Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry is familiar, having as governor signed into law a 2003 Texas bill that allowed the company to start up its low-level nuclear waste-disposal business.
Treating nitrate salts stored at Waste Control Specialists is particularly tricky, as Los Alamos is not authorized to take custody of the waste again; the nitrate salts were removed from the northern New Mexico site in 2014 to comply with a legally binding cleanup deadline with the state.
Aside from that, Waste Control Specialist’s contract to store the Los Alamos waste runs out in March, within the first 100 days. The company will need an extension of the pact, a DOE subcontract awarded by WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Remediation of upward of 300 metric tons of radioactively contaminated mercury at the Tennessee site’s Y-12 nuclear weapons plant.
The heavy metal, used in the production of hydrogen bombs during the Cold War, leaked into the environment and now must be gathered back up. A treatment plant is not expected to be operational until 2022, the middle of a hypothetical second Trump term, but design work is already underway.
A project that young in the design cycle could gain new traction in a new presidency as its advocates lobby for attention, or it could get lost in the shuffle amid other priorities.
Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant: Along with waste treatment at Savannah River, this Kentucky project is one of the DOE cleanups that might see changes in top management early in the new administration.
A competition to replace incumbent deactivation contractor Fluor Federal Services is underway, and the transition period for the new contract is well within President Trump’s first 100 days.
There are, of course, more fundamental questions about long-term funding at the Paducah site – questions that also affect the Portsmouth site across the border in Ohio. This has not escaped the Trump administration’s notice.
In the now-infamous, since-disavowed memo the Trump transition team sent to DOE late last year, the new administration’s advisers put then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz under the gun about the department’s plans to permanently deal with a projected long-term shortfall in uranium cleanup funds.
The Obama administration planned to plug the hole by levying a new tax on nuclear power companies. The Trump administration, with its anti-regulatory, anti-tax bent, might not be amenable that tactic. Republicans in Congress have already refused to go along with the new industry fees.
Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant: Portsmouth has the same long-term funding problems as its sister site in Kentucky, plus a more market-based difficulty.
Lately, funding to clean up this Cold War uranium enrichment facility has come up short because of depressed uranium prices.
Portsmouth contractor Fluor-BWXT gets most of its revenue for its work at the site by selling government uranium bartered to it by DOE. Remaining funds come from taxpayers, and the annual appropriations process is seldom smooth. Ohio’s congressional delegation often goes to bat for Portsmouth, securing extra funding through appropriations bills if the uranium barter arrangement leaves the contractor short of its budget projection.
Also at Portsmouth, checking radiation levels on old enrichment equipment is proving more difficult than expected. Contractor Fluor invested heavily in non-destructive assay — checking something for contamination without breaking that thing open — but the approach hasn’t worked as well as the company hoped. Fluor may now have to consider old-fashioned dissection and inspection: a potentially longer and more expensive process.
Finally, the Trump administration could call for an about-face of the Obama administration’s decision to dismantle the American Centrifuge project in Portsmouth. In his confirmation hearing, Energy Secretary-designate Perry promised Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) the Trump administration would “look objectively” at resuming the experimental uranium-enrichment technology — not exactly a commitment.
Savannah River Site: The big question at Savannah River, which has big repercussions for legacy nuclear cleanup, is this: what will the Trump administration do about the site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), which is over budget, behind schedule, and still under construction?
The facility was designed to turn 36 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors as part of an arms-reduction pact with Russia finalized in 2010 — a deal Moscow unilaterally abandoned last year, citing the Obama administration’s decision to cut bait on the facility and instead dilute American plutonium for underground disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Congress, by and large, still wants build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The Russian government, however, has signaled it would not adhere to all the terms of the broader arms-reduction pact of which the facility is a part unless the U.S. concedes to terms that include repeal of economic sanctions against Russia, and scaling back the NATO military presence in many eastern European countries. Russia watchers view those demands as political bluster, and the Obama administration showed no interest in acceding to the Kremlin’s demands.
So, while decisions about the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility are above the pay grade even of the secretary of energy, they are decisions the Trump administration could hand down within its first 100 days in office. They could even be among the “good deals” Trump told The New York Times he could strike with Russia.
At a more granular level, DOE is set to usher in a new liquid waste management prime at Savannah River in the first 100 days of the Trump administration. DOE could announce an award in early April, based on the June 30, 2017, expiration date on incumbent Savannah River Remediation’s contract and the follow-on deal’s 90-day transition period.
Bidding pits AECOM, lead parent company on the incumbent, against Fluor and BWXT for a $6 billion worth of work over 10 years, including a two-year option period.
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: New Mexico essentially gave DOE until June 30 to resume normal waste-emplacement operations at WIPP, but the agency and its contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, think they can hit the milestone well within the first 100.
A larger issue is how well WIPP will do in the Trump administration’s fiscal 2018 federal budget request. Restoring underground air circulation to levels that allow DOE to simultaneously bury waste and mine out more underground space is not a trivial or cheap undertaking. The price tag is somewhere between $270 million and $400 million, and work would not be finished until 2021, at the earliest.
Whether that cost and schedule assumption holds up is something the Trump administration could determine inside the first 100 days, if the 2018 budget request shows up in that timeframe.
