A unified 2024 National Defense Authorization Act unveiled this week provides about what President Joe Biden sought for cleanup of Department of Energy nuclear weapon sites, but won’t expand a compensation program for sick nuclear workers.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) report published Wednesday by a House-Senate conference committee, does not reauthorize the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which is scheduled to expire in a few months.
Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) support reauthorizing the compensation act as part of the NDAA and amended the Senate’s version of the bill to include an extension. However, Senate and House negotiators stripped the amendment out of the compromise NDAA they crafted behind closed doors over the past two weeks.
There was no compensation act extension in the House NDAA and this week’s conference report said the Senate “recedes” on this issue. The NDAA must still pass both chambers and be signed by Biden.
Hawley reiterated Thursday he plans to oppose any NDAA that does not include the compensation measure.
“This is a grave injustice,” Hawley said in a Thursday press release. “This [NDAA] turns its back on the people of the United States in defense of the lobbyists, and the suits, and the corporate entities who are going to get paid.”
Like the Biden request, the conference bill authorizes more than $7 billion in defense environmental cleanup at Cold War and Manhattan Project sites overseen by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. The conference committee version, however, is for $7.04 billion or about $30 million less than what the White House sought.
Defense environmental cleanup is by far the largest tranche of money included in Environmental Management’s $8-billion-plus budget.
While the defense policy bill would enable the Richland Operations Office at the Hanford Site in Washington state to spend up to the requested $921 million in fiscal 2024, Hanford’s Office of River Protection, responsible for liquid waste cleanup, would be limited to less than $1.94 billion, or $36 million below the request.
For River Protection, Congress declined to match the requested authorization for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant built by Bechtel. DOE currently anticipates starting to convert some of the less-radioactive tank waste in a glass form at the plant during the first half of the 2025 calendar year.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management, like many other federal entities, is currently funded under a continuing budget resolution in place through Jan. 19. Until then, the cleanup office is working with an annualized equivalent of an $8 billion budget, roughly $300 million less than the House approved in its fiscal 2024 appropriations bill and $500 million less than the Senate Appropriations committee’s bill.
